Beylorussian WWII Hell Brilliantly Communicated

Rating: Null/10 (27 February 2006)

This excellent film has a haunting and surreal quality that is difficult to describe. The setting is 1943 in Belorussia behind the Russian-German lines. The Germans are carrying out their policy of annihilating the Slavic races. The Nazis seem to have their evil eyes everywhere symbolized by a forked-tailed reconnaissance plane that flies periodically over the landscape.
As the movie progresses death appears inescapable as the protagonist, a young Beylorussian boy who joins the partisans, returns home after being left behind on a partisan raid. He and Glasha, a young woman he's with, discover that his village's population has been slaughtered. His twin younger sisters who were introduced earlier are especially cute and delightful kids. Their deaths and that of his mother, who had berated him for taking a risk in joining the Partisans, is made to look Kafkan in its incomprehensible and inescapable evil.
The climax of the film is the sickening scene of the Nazis SD troops torching a farm house after forcing all of another village's inhabitants inside. The scene ends with yodeling music as the troops continue a pillaging rampage with flamethrowers. One shot which sears ones mind is a close up of one Nazis infantryman rapidly shaking his head back and forth jiggling his cheeks as if he has just taken a shot of whiskey. While enjoying the intense high of the slaughter he smiles at the camera. This is the all too human serial murderer's psycho-sexual high captured in a nutshell on film.
However, for some reason another scene sticks out most in my mind. This is the scene shot from behind of a German motorcycle with attached sidecar in a dawn fog putting along a dirt road leading into the soon to be torched village. The motorcycle is carrying a dead villager with a sign that says "I insulted a German soldier". Klimov does a great job at building a feeling of impending doom. You just know that when the fog lifts that day there is going to be hell to pay. I wonder how many of those German motorcycles with sidecars and accompanying machine guns traveled down dirt roads in Russia and the rest of occupied Europe in WW II (many thousands no doubt). They must have often brought just this since of impending doom captured in the film.
The partisans ambush the Nazi SD troops in a wood after they leave the village. Somehow this act appears sordid and mundane as does the village slaughter and it does not give a vindication as would a Robert Mitchum or John Wayne movie. Klimov has certainly brilliantly captured the horror and brutality of war in "Come and See".