Definitely Worth Seeing

Rating: 9/10 (11 December 2010)

Come and See is an unforgettable film about the horrors and atrocities of war. It's a quintessential anti-war film, and like all true anti-war films, this is not a glossy romanticized version of war. This is gritty and brutal and the landscape is strewn with blood and devastation.
The story follows Florya, a young and impressionable Byelorussian boy who joins the Resistance army during WWII. As his fellow partisans depart the camp to fight for their cause, Florya is left behind. What follows is an unbelievable journey of survival with images that are so grippingly terrifying they are forever seared into my memory.
One of the most touching and meaningful scenes in the film occurs near the end. Florya has carried a rifle with him throughout the entire film. As many times as death has confronted him, as many narrow escapes as he has made, he has yet to use his rifle. After so facing so much monstrosity, he is reunited with the partisans again. As they are about to depart, Florya encounters a portrait of Hitler in a puddle. He shoots the portrait and what follows is a sequence of montages playing in reverse, sliding back in time: concentration camp corpses; Nazi party congresses in the 1930s; Hitler in combat during World War I; Hitler as a youth and finally a photo of baby Hitler in his mother's lap. Florya doesn't hesitate to shoot after each sequence, but when he faces baby Hitler in the last montage, he is unable to pull the trigger. There is something so remarkably sad, tragic, and yet heroic in his inability to shoot baby Hitler. It's a display of Florya's humanity after everything that he's suffered thorough that is so expressive and evocative of emotion.
When Florya finally stands as a survivor at the end of the film, he has a choice to join the Resistance and not be left behind this time. It is as an informed man, instead of an impressionable boy, who has earned the right to fight, that he trails off with the partisan forces.