COME AND SEE  (1985)  ****

Reviewed 2/3/01

COME AND SEE is hands down one of the most incredible film experiences one can come across. The lead actor, Aleksei Kravchenko is amazing, playing Florya, a boy not quite at the verge of adulthood who enlists to go to war against the Nazis in 1943 Soviet Byelorussia. His face is endlessly expressive depicting horror and playfulness with equal vigor. What he experiences however is much more of the former. Early on, Florya's mother hysterically begs him not to go off to war, saying he might as well kill his family right now. He tries to keep his little twin sisters calm by winking at them, but he really fails to understand why his mother is so upset. By the end of COME AND SEE, her behavior seems all too sane.

Elem Klimov's direction attains a dreamlike poetry. The story has some resemblance to Andrei Tarkovsky's IVAN'S CHILDHOOD, and Klimov seems to have been influenced by Tarkovsky, the Taviani brothers, and Sergei Paradjanov. The latter particularly comes through in a scene in which Florya and the abandoned Glasha (Olga Mironova) shake the trees and dance in the rain with little rainbows popping up on the camera lense. That is only one of the film's many great sequences. Starting with Florya's unearthing of a rifle to his company being photographed to Florya making Glasha laugh to the bombing of their camp to the death of a cow to the documentary footage run in reverse, COME AND SEE is one memorable scene after another. At one point Florya and Glasha try to make their way through a bog, the incoherent struggle through the mud reflecting Florya's mental state at the time. This is immediately preceded by a split-second shot of something Glasha sees that has to be one of the most shocking images ever put on film. Although Florya has not seen the ghastly sight, he already senses the truth deep down and is doing all he can to deny it.

Klimov's use of ambient sound works spectacularly to move the film into the realm of impressionism. After a bombing, he literalizes the ringing in Florya's ears, and Klimov frequently uses a low hum to enhance the film's dreamlike images. The only problem with the film occurs in the last third when the focus moves off Florya and onto Nazi atrocities that are piled on so relentlessly, it becomes mind-numbing. Given Russian history and over 20 million killed however, this seemingly excessive masochism is understandable even if not aesthetically effective.