Once Seen Never Ever Forgotten

Rating: 9/10 (28 January 2010)

Elem Klimov's COME AND SEE is a film best remembered for one scene and it'd probably be wrong to say it should be remembered for more that since THAT scene is one of the most disturbing and harrowing ever committed to celluloid . It also means the rest of the movie struggles hard to make up for it even though it tries . In many ways it's a throwback to the Soviet Home Front type of war movie mixed with Tarkovsky . Nature in all its imagery features prominently throughout the film . Forests are beautiful , green and silent on the surface but feature filthy , stinking swamps where a human can drown in . Man is also a hostage to the elements where rain soaks the skin and causes a human being to shiver . Man is not as fortunate as a bird who evolution has blessed with feathers and can sit on a swamp without sinking
Like Andrie's Tarkovsky' 1962 film IVAN'S CHILDHOOD the story revolves around an older child - Florya - who finds himself caught up in the insanity of war in Byelorussia . While nature is cruel there's nothing more cruel than human tribalism coupled with unthinking ideology , a lesson Florya and the audience will find out later in the film . Until then the film concentrates on Florya's almost naive sense of adventure . The partisans leave him behind as they go to fight the Nazis so Florya wanders through the deep forests with his companion , an older girl called Glasha , perhaps blissfully unaware what the future holds for them both
The film climaxes with an atrocity brought upon a village occupied by a Nazi death squad Einsatzkommando unit . People often use SCHINDLER'S LIST as the one film to show the brutality of the Nazi regime but to be honest the impact of Nazi atrocities may have a stronger impact here . There's a clinical ,impersonal feel to humans being murdered by zyklon B in gas chambers but to watch people being burned alive while the perpetrators laugh and treat the massacre as a nice day out does chill the blood . Worse still it's all based on truth . COME AND SEE finishes with a caption that 626 Byelorussian villages and their inhabitants were burnt to the ground . This was only in Bylorussia . This isn't counting the towns in Russia , Ukraine and other places in the USSR that was visited by Nazi murder squads . Disgracefully Mel Gibson recreated this very scene in THE PATRIOT where the British red coats committed an identical act even though there's no record of anything similar having happened during the American war of independence
In conclusion COME AND SEE is a film that deserves to be seen by everyone even though it's sometimes distressing . It's this nihilistic and horrifying , brutal impact war has upon people in general and the young in particular that makes it a must see movie . It's also the last film director ElemKlimov ever made which is possibly just as well since it's the one one film a director should be remembered for . Such great talent going to Hollywood making romantic comedies and action blockbusters would have been such a waste