9/10
Director: Elem Klimov
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-Ro0SZf438
Entire film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjIiApN6cfg&t=3s
Though made almost forty years ago, Come and See offers insight as to how Russia wages war in Ukraine today, though of course sympathy for its cause isn’t likely to arise and isn’t hoped for here.
This Soviet-era film is one of the greatest war movies ever made. The title comes from the Book of Revelations and we are shown an Eastern European apocalypse of pitiless attacks and reprisals. It attempts to show what Russia went through in World War Two, or what its people call the Great Patriotic War, during which 20-27 million of them were killed.
The storytelling is lyrical and relies less on words than on images – most of them startling and nightmarish. In the opening, two boys are digging around the graves of German soldiers hoping to find weapons, heedless of an old man’s caution. Florya, the main character, a boy of fifteen or so, finds a rifle and knows it will allow him to join the partisan band hidden in a forest. The other boy digs up a German army belt with the Wehrmacht inscription “God with us”. In this and other scenes a plane looks down from the sky.
Florya’s mother doesn’t want him to leave home. But it’s wartime, everything’s changed, and she cannot stop him. Off he marches with his new companions, some of whom steal a few animals for those back at the camp. Life in the dark forest is shaped by peasant crudeness, soldierly camaraderie, and cold determination. The nationalistic boastfulness expected in a Russian war film isn’t there. In the woods and adjacent fields, Florya and Glasha, a girl his age, share occasional moments of Eden-like beauty but they end with a fierce artillery barrage.
The central event is the annihilation of a village, probably in retaliation for supporting partisans. The SS need no evidence, any village will do. The operation is routine. People are herded into a church which is then boarded up. Grenades are tossed through windows and flamethrowers ignite the old wood. An inferno breaks out. Soldiers press a pistol to Florya’s head ands others take Glasha into the back of a truck. The scene goes on for some twenty minutes. Late in the day, the troops cheer as the church collapses and the fires begin to die down. They pack up and head back to base.
Some of the SS troops are later captured. An officer defiantly defends the Reich’s destruction of inferior people. (Tarantino pays homage to the scene in his Inglourious Basterds.) Florya douses them with gasoline and his comrades do the rest.
Florya ages and hardens. He determines to drive out the Germans as relentlessly and pitilessly as they came in. The penultimate scene in which Florya vents his rage is rather weak, though it does suggest a frame of mind that will kill all Germans, even children. In the final scene he and his partisan band fade into a darkening forest. (Kubrick nods to both scenes toward the end of Full Metal Jacket.)
A closing graphic states that the Third Reich destroyed 628 Belorussian villages during the war.
©2023 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to fellow Hoya Susan Ganosellis.