Debasement and Moral Penury

Rating: 9/10 (11 April 2020)

Come and See
The study of history asks a prescient question of its representation in media. Every sentence, documentary or film about a particular event removes some layer of epistemological truth from its location in time. To effect, this sometimes informs upon the event, bringing a renewed sense of interest, if not objectivity, to the moment. However, the question of authorship remains a dilemma for any historical study.
Rarely does the depiction of an historical period transcend both the practice and medium. Elem Klimov's 1985 bildungsroman 'Come and See' achieves this transformation, surpassing its aesthetical limitations to inform and illuminate the German occupation of Soviet Belorussia in 1943.
The viewer enters upon a depleted landscape as two youths dig for guns in sand. The nature of the earth confirms the abasement we will see further on. We soon learn one must provide their own weapon to join local partisans fighting the Nazi invasion. As Flyora, the young teenager at the center of the film's narrative, leaves his home to join the fighters, the audience doesn't yet know, upon his return, nothing will ever be the same again.
Once in the forest with the partisans, the director deploys the camera in two distinct modes. The initial offers us witness, as the merry group poses heroically in front of a photographer, awaiting battle. We will see this again from the German side. The other, more common treatment seen throughout the film, involves Klimov turning the camera upon a principal actor and, in return, that character confronting the viewer. The director's adversarial use of the lens confirms the nature of the story and provides a direct emotional link to the two main characters and their utterly abject edification.
In the forest, Flyora meets his female counterpart, Glasha. As they play amongst the trees, the horror of war besets their pastoral harmony. They are soon forced on an odyssey of complete physical and emotional penury.
The film's corrupted landscape echoes the scabrous topography of moral depravity. Even the film stock, defused of color, pale and sallow like the characters, plays to this aesthetical anemia.
The use of sound and its elision also reinforces the nuanced destruction of warfare. After a bombardment shatters the two teenagers' frolic in the forest, Flyora's deafness permeates the soundtrack. We are left with the piercing pitch of aural trauma and the fuzzy static of a muted world.
The narrative reaches its licentious climax as Germans commit a 'pogrom' against the Jews of a Belorussian village. Klimov blends hyper-real images, searing their ghastly certainty deep into the viewers' minds, with completely absurd surrealism. Never has war looked so absolute and horrifying. The other-worldly feeling of the film washes upon the screen like a diaphanous cloud dissected by the violence of sunlight. It is a liminal reality in which the two main protagonists disappear.
By the film's end, Flyora stands unrecognizable. Klimov's elision of time casts our teenager as an old-man, visible wrinkles and scars appearing from nowhere. Likewise, once an image of innocent beauty in a flowing green dress, Glasha reappears, blood running the length of her inner thighs, her physical violation reflecting her emotional depredation. Gone are any traces of the characters' former selves. In their place lie the type of fragments only war's monstrosity provides.
We are finally left with a curious interweaving of stock footage, deployed by Klimov in a radical 'de-aging' of Hitler to the moment of his childhood. As Flyora stares at the non-diegetic image of Hitler as a child in his mother's arms, the viewer recalls a man's warning at the beginning of the film: Do not dig! It starts with children. He soon disappears into a mass of partisans as they traverse a forest. He has achieved his desire...He is now a soldier.