Unreal Realism COME AND SEE

Rating: 10/10 (23 August 2006)

THE terrible central event of ''Come and See,'' which takes up about a quarter of the 2-hour, 22-minute Soviet movie, is the burning of a Byelorussian village by German invaders in 1943. A line on the screen tells us that hundreds of villages in the Soviet republic east of Poland were destroyed, their people annihilated. The history is harrowing and the presentation is graphic; you feel it through your body as villagers are packed into a barn to be incinerated.
Powerful material, powerfully rendered by the director and co-writer Elem Klimov, yet the scene goes on for so long with such heavy-handed intrusions that you are left with a feeling of being worked on - which means the effects have stopped working. So it is with the movie as a whole, which won a grand prize at the 1985 Moscow international film festival.
In episodes that shift, sometimes subtly, sometimes startlingly, from down-in-the-mud realism to a dreamlike state, a boy named Florya endures the German invasion. His family is slaughtered; a friend, a beautiful young woman who wants only love and babies, is raped; he joins the partisans, is captured and nearly killed. He is our witness to the savagery of the Nazi onslaught against the peoples of Eastern Europe. But it becomes evident early on that young Florya, played by a grimacing Aleksei Kravchenko, serves Mr. Klimov mainly as a body through which he can display his directorial powers.
The inherent conflict between the director and the character with whom the audience is expected to identify becomes most troubling in a climactic scene that is poundingly effective taken by itself but makes no sense at all from Florya's point of view. We are asked to believe he has a vision of Hitler's career, running backward in time, from the German invasion to Adolf as babe in arms. You don't have to be unduly literal minded to realize as the newsreels are driving in reverse that this is not the vision of a peasant lad who hasn't been to the movies much. It's a movie maker's tour de force.
After years of running into troubles with his country's film authorities, Mr. Klimov was elected president of the Soviet Film Makers Union, a beneficiary of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's experiment in glasnost, or openness. Possibly the unorthodox style of ''Come and See'' would bother some cultural commissar, but there is little in its content to offend the authorized Soviet view of World War II. The partisans are comradely; the Germans are pulp villains, sadistic, cowardly, fanatic. ''Inferior races spread the microbe of Communism,'' declares one whose particular mission is to kill Russian infants. Not only does an SS officer drag a woman by her hair on the way to her fate worse than death but he also pauses to light a cigarette. Mr. Klimov can't leave bad enough alone.
The ending is a dose of instant inspirationalism. The camera makes its way through the forest to the accompaniment of a choir that soars and soars until we get a glimpse of the heavens, not the most original moment in the movie. Yet scene for scene, Mr. Klimov proves a master of a sort of unreal realism that seeks to get at events terrible beyond comprehension. He shows what he can do particularly after Florya has been deafened by bombs and we seem to be inside the boy's head, with the sounds of the outside world overwhelmed by his panting breaths; everything turns distant and ominous. Ominous enough without Mr. Klimov's intrusions, at the expense of his own unquestionable talent.