50 Great War Films: Come and See

 

Directed by Elem Klimov - 1985 Poster

The last words spoken in Apocalypse Now was The Horror. Well, this could have been the title of this movie. From the first scene to the last, the viewer feels as if he is in a nightmare - of cruelty, sadism, despair. It's 1943 in Belarussia - two boys are digging in a sand-filled trench - looking for, and finding, a rifle. The following day two Belarusian partisans arrive at the boy Flyora's house to conscript him. His mother, with two very young twin daughters, pleads with him not to go. Even though one half knew it was coming, later on in the film Flyora returns home and, after desperately searching for them through a quagmire, has to face up to the fact that they, with other villagers, have been shot dead. In these early days he meets up with a young girl Glasha and they establish a  frightened bond. Horrific scene piles on horrific scene - two of the three men who go with Flyora to look for food are blown up crossing a minefield; the third man, Rubezh a partisan fighter, steals a cow with Flyora but both he and the cow are killed by German machine gun fire. The close-up of the cow's dead eye is unnerving.

Glasha and Flyora

And so it goes on - leading to the most ghastly scene of all. Flyora is taken by a man whose horse and cart he tried to steal, to his Perekhody village. The SS and Ukrainian collaborators surround and occupy the village. Flyora tries to warn them that they are being shunted to their death inside a wooden church. He manages to escape, as does a young woman who is then gang-raped by the Germans. The church is set alight and all inside are burnt to death (shades of Oradour sur Glane in France, which we visited some years back). The Germans, in turn, are ambushed and mostly killed; eleven are captured, including the commander, an SS-Sturnbannfuhrer. They are doused with petrol but are killed before they can be set alight. In what was one of the most powerful sections of the film, Flyora notices a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler in a puddle; as he repeatedly shoots at it, simultaneously there is a montage of original newsreel, showing Hitler's life in reverse, including ghastly scenes of Jews in concentration camps. A title card then informs the viewer that 628 Belarusian villages were burnt to the ground with all their inhabitants by the Nazis. Flyora finally rushes off to join his fellow partisans as they march through the forest.

Aleksei Kravchenko as Flyora

The acting of the fourteen year-old boy was stupendous. Aleksei Kravchenko as Flyora said that he underwent the most debilitating fatigue and hunger. I kept a most severe diet, and after the filming was over I returned to school, not only thin, but grey-haired. His expressive eyes, which held so much pain by the end, as the tear trickled down his increasing lined face, was frightening in their intensity. These events really did happen in Belarus and the actors were not professionals but real peasants. The supporting actors Olga Mironova as Glasha, Liuborimus Laucevicius as Kosach, Vlada Badonas as Rubezh and Tatyana Shestakova as Flyora's mother were also very good. The film was shot in chronological order over a period of nine months, which made it even more effective.

Reviews were positive: Walter Goodman (The New York Times) wrote that the history is harrowing and the presentation is graphic...powerful material, powerfully rendered; Rita Kempley (The Washington Post) said it was directing with an angry eloquence, [Kilimov] taps into that hallucinatory nether world of blood and escalating madness that Francis Ford Coppola found in Apocalypse Now. Roger Ebert described it as one of the most devastating films ever about anything, and, in it, the survivors must envy the dead.

1999 DVD