There have been many Russian movies on the subject of World War II but none more ferocious than Elem Klimov’s “Come and See.” Seldom if ever have wartime atrocities been depicted so vividly — and with such hallucinated fervor.
Released in 1985 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Soviet victory, now newly restored and playing at Film Forum from Feb. 21 through March 3, “Come and See” shows Nazi-occupied Byelorussia (now Belarus) through the eyes of an increasingly traumatized 14-year-old boy, Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko).
The title comes from the Book of Revelation. The first words spoken are “Hey, are you crazy!” The final sequence, a frenzied assemblage of photographs and newsreel clips in which time speeds up and goes in reverse, defies description.
“Come and See” begins with a series of mysterious encounters as Flyora finds a rifle, bids his frantic mother farewell, and sets off to join the partisans in the forest. The light is unearthly. The Steadicam seldom stops moving through a Boschian hellscape, filled with unseen voices and offscreen dangers. At various times, Flyora is deafened by explosions or rendered mute with horror. Before the movie ends, his hair has turned gray and his prematurely wizened face has frozen in a mask of terror.
The camera calms down and comes in close for the film’s central atrocity. Music blares, dogs bark as, having taken a town, a squadron of drunken German soldiers rounds up the inhabitants and parades them into a wooden barn to meet a fiery doom. Writing in The New York Times, the reviewer Walter Goodman said that the scene goes on so long that “you are left with a feeling of being worked on.” That’s one way to put it. A postscript mentions that, during their scorched-earth retreat, the Germans torched 628 Byelorussian villages.
The script, which had to wait eight years for official approval, was by Klimov and the Byelorussian writer Ales Adamovich, a teenage partisan fighter during World War II. Klimov, six years younger than Adamovich, was 10 when he and his family were evacuated from Stalingrad. “The city was ablaze up to the top of the sky,” he once said, adding with regard to “Come and See” that, “Had I included everything I knew and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it.” One wonders how he was able to stage it.
More horrifically antiwar than romantically partisan or patriotic in the tradition of Soviet combat films, “Come and See” ends with intimations of nuclear catastrophe, presaging what came to be called the cinema of glasnost. The movie won the grand prize at the 1985 Moscow Film Festival and the next year, Klimov was elected first secretary of the Soviet Film Makers Union. As such he was largely responsible for taking banned movies off the shelf. The most notorious of these was his own, a floridly expressionist account of Czar Nicholas II’s final days, “Agoniya,” released here as “Rasputin.”
Although involved with subsequent projects, Klimov, who died in 2003, never made another movie. “Come and See” would be his — some would say “the” — last word.
Come and See
Feb. 21 through March 3 at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, Manhattan; 212-727-8110, filmforum.org.
Rewind is an occasional column covering revived, restored and rediscovered movies playing in New York’s repertory theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
