Come and See (1985)

"Wars do not determine who is right, only who is left." - Bertrand Russell

There is an animal in every human being. We are undoubtedly those thinking reeds Pascal spoke of... perhaps even the stardust that the Great Will or Carl Sagan talked about, but we frequently eat, breathe in a precise rhythm, go to the bathroom daily, copulate, do everything we can to help our fellow human beings, or to bring them to their knees, whenever one or the other is necessary. Neither the animal nor the soul completely represents us, but only a combinative version of them, in constant motion. Come and See is an attempt to explain this perpetual struggle of accommodation between the being and the body when it is most severely tested: in the extreme conditions of an apocalyptic war: WW2.

In Russian cinema, as well as in universal cinema, Elem Klimov has a great merit of originality. Few people recognize him in the art world and even fewer in everyday life. In Come and See, Klimov experiments with a new way using common techniques that work well because everything we see and hear happens through the sensory filter of the main character (excellent scenes when he temporarily loses his hearing and the soundtrack is muted or fades away for the same period of time).

His name is Florian and he is a boy forced to live a terrible personal tragedy against the backdrop of a grotesque, global one. What could be worse? The fresh-faced adolescent from the beginning of the film, now emancipated and darkened in the final frames, creates a striking contrast and is the result of the major trials the character must go through: slaughter, the loss of his family (mother and two angelic twin sisters), innocence and trust (a brief idyll in the woods), mud (Russians have always associated the mire of war), blood, torture, rape, terrifying bombardments, people burning, absurd exercises of force and authority...

“I have rarely seen a film more ruthless in its depiction of human evil.” — Roger Ebert

It has been said that this monumental fresco is the most important cinematic protest ever formulated against war, and I share the almost unanimous opinions that Come and See far surpasses the horrors of Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, The Platoon, or Saving Private Ryan, even though the film is much poorer in explicit scenes. Klimov worked on this film for almost five years without compromising in a cinema that was strongly Sovietized and in which the interventions of any political commissar in film scripts were commonplace. Therefore, in Come and See, the partisans fighting against the Nazis are no better, and the accused is not the German army (although the film deliberately exaggerates the historical truth regarding its atrocities), but humanity itself, for a degree of decay that it should not have known or touched.

The film closes emblematically with the image of Florian shooting a portrait of Hitler over which projections of him during his rise to power are superimposed. At each shot: either a speech or a slogan... The symbol is that he could have been stopped at each of these moments without reaching the atrocities of war. But when he has to shoot a photograph of Hitler as a child in his mother's arms... Florian doesn't do it...(you'll have to discover the meaning of this gesture for yourself).

Come and See: Come and See... because it's a film that really must be seen.

Elem Klimov... (with only two other reference films - Agony 1975 and No Trespassing 1964), remains a director who has been overlooked far too easily.