Come and See, but Don't Return

Rating: 6/10 (21 April 2013)

Kilmov's 1985 film Come and See is a harrowing war drama that marks an unmistakable departure from war films of the Thaw era that preceded it. Whereas earlier films used World War II largely as a backdrop for psychological exploration of the people who lived through and after its trials, Come and See is truly a film about the War. The title, an allusion to the destruction wrought by the four horsemen of the apocalypse, relates the film to the 1962 film Ivan's Childhood, in which these apocalyptic harbingers were also featured, in addition to featuring a young man ripped too early into maturity as the central protagonist.
From the beginning, Come and See is a series of violent, arduous events almost totally devoid of respite. Florya, the protagonist, finds a gun buried with a corpse in the sand near his village, and uses it to join the Belorussian Partisan Forces. When he is left behind in reserve, the reality of war's harshness settles in as the camp is bombed, his village is massacred, and he is tossed among seemingly endless episodes of death and destruction, ever pursued by the lazy circling of buzzard-like German airplanes.
The devastation is so constant that Florya's development throughout the ordeal is manifested largely in an almost perpetually present mask of fear stretched across his face, at times pierced by cries of anguish. In one memorable scene, Florya watches as Nazi troops slaughter an entire village by locking them in a church, lobbing grenades inside, setting the structure on fire, opening fire with machine guns, and initiating a final conflagration with a flamethrower. Their actions are quite literally overkill, completely gratuitous violence, reminiscent of the film as a whole, which shows many more scenes of violence than are necessary merely to express how much destruction the Germans wrought in Belorussia. Each one is nonetheless meaningful, portraying how awful the conflict really was for peasants and their families.
Come and See achieves its effect through powerful visuals and sounds. The harrowing atmosphere created by the events on screen is echoed by the jarring buzzing of tinnitus, airplanes, flies, and machine guns, and unsettling situations are in turn mirrored by unsettling shots. When Florya is left behind in the woods and finds Glasha, two young children in an environment that is distinctly not child-friendly are framed dead-center during their conversation, an unnerving method of filming that marks the scene as all wrong. This combination of disconcerting plot, shots, and sound creates a film that is comprehensively disturbing, but very powerful.
This relative torture of the viewer is important to make clear the anguish constantly bearing down on Florya, the result of which is underscored in the final scene. Florya, who has lost his village, family, friends, and innocence in a very short period of time, fires his rifle–his blessing and curse–for the first time in the film at a portrait of Hitler. As he fires, he imagines the Nazi rise to power occurring in reverse, but when it reverses far enough to become a baby Hitler on his mother's lap, Florya cannot bring himself to fire. His face has become old and grizzled from his harsh ordeal, but he retains his humanity despite his anger and what he has seen. There is no happy ending to this film, but given all that has happened, it ends as hopefully as it reasonably could, with Florya running to join the ranks of his comrades in the woods, leaving the destruction–at least temporarily–behind. As a whole Come and See depicts physical and emotional devastation from beginning to end, but is nonetheless worth seeing for a realistic portrayal of the most grotesque horrors of war.