COME AND SEE Movie Review

Idi i Smotri Go and See

1985 Elem Klimov

Long, flawed, absolutely harrowing, Elem Klimov's rarely seen masterpiece turns the conventional war story into horror. Though it lacks the scope and technical sophistication of Schindler's List, the intense reactions it provokes are the same. Klimov's subject is atrocity—true genocide, the efforts of the German Army and the Nazi Party not simply to occupy territory and gain political ends, but to eliminate entire populations of undesirable “inferior” races.

In Byelorussia, 1943, two peasant boys dig in the sand, surrounded by the burnt ruins of some previous engagement. The smaller boy tells Flor (Alexsei Kravchenko) that he must find a weapon if he wants to join the partisans. To the loud and emotional dismay of his mother he does just that, and finds that the guerrillas are a poorly equipped lot. He has barely been introduced to them, though, before he and a young woman, Glasha (Olga Mironova), are left behind as the others set off on a mission. At that point, the film becomes a surreal journey, an episodic story of initiation as Flor and the viewer gradually come to discover what is happening.

For Western audiences who are probably unfamiliar with what took place in Byelorussia, the action often seems inexplicable. Who are the various characters Flor and Glasha meet? What are they doing? Initially, Klimov's directorial style has certain off-putting quality for the uninitiated, too. He seems enamored of long follow shots, where his camera stays behind a group of running figures for a seemingly interminable length of time and to no apparent narrative end. In those scenes and in others that isolate Flor even farther from everything he knows, Klimov is setting up the second half of the film, when the Nazis finally emerge from the thick morning fog and Flor is trapped in a small village.

Until then, the invaders have been largely invisible, seen only as airplanes high in the sky or by shells that rain down from distant guns. But once they appear in ever-increasing numbers and cajole the villagers into obeying their orders, the tenor of the film changes. Moment by moment, what had been random and remote becomes immediate. Klimov lets those events transpire at an unhurried pace at first. The soldiers are rough and brusque but businesslike. When the destruction begins and the enormity of their evil is revealed, the deliberate pace makes the horror all the more jolting and believable. And that is the film's central strength. The film is based on true accounts, written by Alex Adamovich, of German atrocities. (They destroyed more than 600 villages in their invasion.) The more significant details—posing for a photograph, the rationales used to separate people into different groups—have the unmistakable ring of truth.

Like Schindler's List, Come and See is fiction that reveals a larger truth so horrible that it is difficult to accept in any form. A black-and-white coda made of documentary footage seems a needless afterthought, but it doesn't dilute the film's power.

Cast: Alexei Kravchenko (Florya Gaishun), Olga Mironova (Glasha), Lubomiras Lauciavicus, Vladas Bagdonas, Viktor Lorents, Juris Lumiste, Kazimir Rabetsky, Yevgeni Tilicheyev; Written by: Elem Klimov, Alex Adamovich; Cinematography by: Alexei Rodionov; Music by: Oleg Yanchenko. Producer: Mosfilm, Sovexportfilm USSR. Russian. Running Time: 142 minutes. Format: VHS.