Go and See

Rating: 10/10 (3 August 2009)

This is a war movie without battles yet probably the visually strongest and most interesting movie ever told about the Second World War. The movie too making you aware of that the Holocaust was not the whole story about World War II. Watching this movie, you certainly will use all of your five senses! The movie starts with a very powerful scene where Florya is taken away to a camp in a Belarussian village to serve in the war. Florya is naively excited about going out in the war but as the story progress he comes to understand that war is not at all heroic, neither about glory, but about suffering and death. When Florya comes to the camp as a "new comer" he is humiliated by that he cannot go out in the war and needs to leave his shoes to someone that needs them better. After the soldiers left the camp, he walks into the wood and cries, and meets Glasha who just been left by her boyfriend that is going out in the war. Glosha is as heartbroken as Florya is and in this emotionally loaded scene, Glosha says "I want to Love" I want to have babies" , which are words that capture something that many people probably lost- their hopes and wishes about life and love. Right after they meet, a bomb falls over them. They survive but stick together as long as possible. The morning after, they go home to Florya to find that his sisters and his mother have been killed along with hundreds of other people of the village, lying in a stack just outside his house. It is a horrible scene, hard to stop think about even after the movie is over. Florya not only grows up emotionally but is aging several years in a two days time! The gun that he so proudly carried in the beginning hasn't been used a single time, except in the very last sequence of the film where he founds a portrait of Hitler in the ruins of the village. Here, a montage like scene is tracing back the most significant events of the Second World War, all the way back to when Hitler was an infant in his mother's lap. This is a very memorable scene and the fact that Florya doesn't shoot may have multiple interpretations, especially since the time is meant for us to reflect over this ourselves. However, seeing this scene, you instantly thinking back to the scene in where hundreds of people were locked in a building and killed but a comment from a soldiers says: "Those without children can leave", "It all starts when you are a child", may suggest that Florya's choose to not kill the infant Hitler which would essentially go against such a revelation.