Makes Saving Private Ryan look like M.A.S.H

Rating: 10/10 (4 August 2009)

This is, quite without hyperbole, the best war movie I have ever seen. Of all the films, in fact of all the books and museum exhibits and documentaries and works of art I've seen, this comes closest of any of them to truly capturing the unglamorous reality of war. Come and See really does make every other war movie I've seen look sanitized and limp by comparison. There is no real heroism, no catharsis, no false assurances that the good will out in the end: only brutality and its victims and witnesses.
The war between Germany and Russia was the most destructive war in human history. Millions of people were slaughtered in a conflict in which virtually no distinction was made between combatants and non-combatants. It is appropriate that this movie is so unsparing of its audience. Given the subject matter, any film that didn't shock and horrify would probably border on untruth.
The movie is set in Belarus in 1943. From the very first there is a sense of dread. We see the movie's main character, Florya, pulling a rifle out of the sand, then a plane flies over him and his friend and we see them from the pilot's perspective: small, diminished, vulnerable, a microcosm of the civilian population destroyed by the Germans on their thrust eastwards. In the next scene we see Florya being taken away by Partisans, despite the entreaties of his anxious mother. They put on a show of dragging him away in front of the other villagers but in fact Florya is happy to go. He positively beams with pride and enthusiasm. His face throughout the film is a powerful reflection of what is going on around him. By the end, it is a mask of trauma and pain: he looks like he's aged twenty years.
Florya links up with a band of Partisans in the forest. He is left behind after they set off and links up with Glasha, a beautiful if somewhat creepy nurse who looks like a Slavic Kirsten Dunst. The Germans bomb the forest and Florya is made temporarily deaf. There is a surreal scene where Florya and Gasha gad about in the forest with a sort of Adam-and-Eve innocence. We are plunged into Florya's aural environment, which consists of throbbing and high-pitched whining and incongruous music. He smiles as he watches Glasha, drenched from the rain, mount a suitcase and dance a lively little jig to the accompaniment of weirdly off-tune music playing, we assume, only in his head. A stork emerges from the trees. This scene is pure visual poetry and, in light of Gasha's ghastly fate, it haunted me after the film was over.
Without wanting to give a scene-by-scene synopsis, things get worse. Florya is progressively engulfed by horror. At first the Germans are scant and elusive but towards the climactic scene they become terribly omnipresent. A propaganda officer assures the assembled peasants in that 'Germany is a civilized country' against a backdrop of barbarism. There is something very effective about the way the German soldiers are portrayed. They are not the archetypal emotionless killing machines. They act like thugs and buffoons and appear to have the time of their lives brutalizing the villagers. None of their individual characters are developed very fully. They are units in a collectivity of evil, too swept up in a pathological group dynamic to think about what they are doing.
The film's central event is among the most traumatizing scenes I've seen in film, a crescendo of butchery which grimly completes the film. Come and See may have been used as propaganda but it still rings far truer, in my opinion, than Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List or any other Hollywood war film praised for its 'realism'. It is the most affecting movie I have seen in a long time and from this day forward will be the standard bearer for any war movie I see.