Idi i smotri

Rating: 8/10 (28 May 2016)

Many little boys have had the same dreams and aspirations as the young Flyora has, to serve his country for glory and honour. Most have not gone through what he experiences in Come and See. The first image is of an old man who is slyly employing reverse psychology to get the boys to stop digging for weapons. He screams himself hoarse like a withered drill sergeant; later as he is found covered in burns inflicted by the Germans, he again heeds his warning, but it is too late. There is no doubt he speaks from experience - he knows the war's terrors, but perhaps he also knows the childlike excitement of playing guns and wanting to march off to defend his country. He, like Flyora's mother, is trying desperately to stop this vicious cycle. She acts exasperated at Flyora's antics, and his desire to join the troops. He is given the old 'act like an adult' treatment as she tells him to brandish the gun and kill them now (because him going off to war would mean the same thing). But as soon as the dream becomes reality Flyora is once again her baby boy, and she whimpers and tries to coddle and hold onto him in vain.
An interesting mentality portrayed here is the soldier's treatment of the war as an opportunity to pose and mould their image. There is a sequence where the camp gathers around for a comradely group shot - they jeer and push and shove and grin, and it seems all fine and dandy. What the camera doesn't capture is the harsh reality of the conditions they endure. Some of the film's most indelible images are not of violence, but of the sheer filth and grim of the camp's various facilities; Flyora scrubbing uniforms in a great big pot of boiling water, and a great, grey chunk of smoking meat (the animal is indistinguishable) rising from a similar pot (the connection is easily established and harder to forget). Later the Germans pose too; in one of the film's iconic shots, a gun is held to the terrified boy's head, and no doubt that photo is going to be framed and used for further purposes. Klimov touches on this theme, perhaps not with the greatest nuance or detail. Here it exists as a simple metaphor - of war being a posed experience for the wider public, for the young boys back home who see only white smiles and shiny guns. Come and See is showing us what lies underneath.
And yet, has the message seeped into Flyora? The film's events continually hurtle towards him, bringing wave of devastation after devastation. But even halfway in when we are convinced this is hell, Flyora still maintains that the soldier is an honourable mantle as he shouts to the farmer. See how periodically Klimov inserts moments of him caressing and cleaning his rifle like an infant child, even after he has seen the destruction that can be released from its barrel. He grips it tightly after he has lost his family, like it is the only comfort he has left in the world, refusing to let go and be rendered vulnerable. And it is not even certain that he has registered the deaths either; as they run out of his decaying home, Glafira looks back to see a pile of bodies stacked up against the side of the wall like they were nothing more than firewood, but Flyora is convinced that his mother is still alive somewhere in the bog. Klimov shows great restraint here; it would have been easy to linger onto this shocking image for a lot longer, but the shot is brief before Glafira is dragged away by Flyora's delusions, and we are left gaping and wondering if what we saw was really that unimaginable horror.
The film's weakest moments make it clear that this is a product of propaganda, set to expose the atrocities committed on the Eastern Front - the Germans are simple, cruel villains that spit out harsh antisemitism (when in reality many soldiers, though they swore the Reichswehreid, did not subscribe to Nazism) and carry out their duty with almost a evil relish, yet they are also cowardly, folding easily under the steely gaze of the partisans and renouncing their ways under the guise of only following orders. The most ludicrous moment comes when Flyora is confronted with a portrait of Adolf Hitler, and footage of the war rewinds and rewinds until he is faced with the infant Fuhrer himself, but cannot pull the trigger. This reeks of oversimplification and sentimentalism; the young boy's turmoil and rage over the horrors of war and yet abated by the very innocence he shed only moments ago. It belongs in a Hollywood film, and a poor one at that.
But Aleksey Kravchenko has made what seems like a straightforward play of morality harrowing and unsettling. His early wide grins at being given extra guard duty are replaced by an expression that can only be the thousand yard stare, the lines in his face weathered and almost gouged in. They belong on a face much older and have no business appearing in his youthful visage. At select moments Klimov uses straight on, symmetrical head shots as a way of mimicking intimacy (Ozu used this technique quiet often). These give the hollow-eyed, blank stares of Flyora an immensely distressing quality, and we cannot look away, yet we also cannot bear to meet his gaze (though his mind is working more than his eyes are). The final shot is masterful; it assumes the point-of-view of Flyora, jogging mechanically at the back of the group, fleeing momentarily into the forest, but as if remembering just a glimmer of the feral, solider mentality of the beginning, he rejoins the partisans. And then he comes to a complete stop in the track, and we can almost feel the child inside him fade away.