Come and See
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Flyora (Aleksey Kravchenko) witnesses German reprisals in Elim Klimov’s Come and See
Come and See is one of the great war films, made the greater by dramatizing a slice of World War II rarely remembered—if known at all—by Western audiences. Released in 1985 after years of trouble in the writing and production stages—all owing to Soviet censorship—Elim Klimov’s film is a harrowing depiction of the war in Byelorussia (now Belarus). It is a surreal, dreamlike, but utterly real and horrifying film, and it should be required viewing.
And I looked, and behold
Two striking group portraits, just about half an hour from both the beginning and end of the film, bookend Come and See.
The first portrait
The first features a band of colorful Soviet partisans, guerrilla fighters with whom the main character, a teenage boy named Flyora (Aleskey Kravchenko) has joined up. He is a babyfaced youth eager to fight, to strike back at the Nazis, who in the early parts of the film are present only as a single scout plane, enemies as distant from Flyora and his world as fairytale giants. Having dug up a rifle from the abandoned trenches of the earlier years of the war, he leaves the family farm despite the frantic and tearful protests of his mother and joins up. The partisans are bluff and vigorous, exuberant men and women with patchwork uniforms and castoff equipment. As they pose for their photo they spot Flyora, wearing one of his father’s far too large suits and carrying his oversized rifle, and they gleefully work him into the front of the group—a hilarious adornment. He beams.
And then he is put to work scrubbing pots, forced to trade his new boots for a veteran’s disintegrating ones, and left in the camp while the others march out to fight.
With the fighters in the band gone, Flyora goes off by himself to weep and meets Glasha (Olga Mironova), whom we intuit is the teenage lover of the partisan band’s leader, Kosach (Liubomiras Laucevicius). Flyora and Glasha bond, albeit uneasily, and Glasha shares her hopes and dreams—a husband, a home, and motherhood. Like Flyora, she aspires to step into a meaningful role and to belong. Then the scout plane returns.
Come and See takes its title from Revelation, from one of the eeriest and most powerful passages in Western literature, and immediately following the return of the German plane we see the film’s own version of the four horsemen—four paratroopers descending into the forest, the vanguard of a German assault on the partisans’ camp. Their arrival, as in Revelation, brings conquest, war, famine, and death. Hell follows with them.
German artillery pounds the forest and Flyora, shellshocked and deafened, reunites with Glasha. They flee. His village is nearby and he means to shelter with his family. When they arrive, the village, which we have already seen crowded and full of life—from the village elder to children and animals—stands empty and silent. Flyora’s mother and sisters are not home, though there is uneaten food on the table and his sisters’ dolls lie lined up on the floor. Flies crawl over everything; their buzzing fills the barnyard and the house.
Glasha seems to catch on before Flyora, who excitedly suggests that his family has hidden on an island in one of the million forest marshes of Byelorussia. That must be it, he thinks, and he leads Glasha there. In one of the film’s most chilling moments, Glasha takes one last look back at Flyora’s farm. She cries out and they run on.
After wading through the muck of the bog Flyora does meet survivors of his village, which has been destroyed by the Germans in retaliation for partisan attacks—exactly what Flyora’s mother had predicted. Flyora is by now almost mad. He is also filthy, and a camp barber snips his hair down to untidy shocks that have already begun to lighten and turn grey.
For lack of anything better to do he joins a few partisan stragglers, scroungers led by the chipper but experienced Rubezh (Vladas Bagdonas), who intends to steal a cow to feed the refugees. The scout plane returns, and Rubezh, Flyora, and the others’ errand, which plays out almost comically for nearly half an hour, does not end well.
A pale horse
It is after the failure of this mission that Come and See’s most excruciating sequence plays out. Flyora, waking stunned in a pasture, wanders until he comes upon an elderly farmer from whom he tries to commandeer a haycart, but the Germans arrive. The old man helps Flyora hide his rifle and equipment and insinuates Flyora into the population of his village—the village that will provide the backdrop for the second group portrait to feature Flyora as a prop.
The Germans have come on an anti-partisan mission, there to exact a reprisal for a vaguely described “insult” to German soldiers. They arrive in force, approaching out of the morning fog as shadows that resolve into a large, heavily armed unit of SS men and collaborators. They empty every house in the village and call for everyone to assemble before an old church. More men arrive by truck. They set up speakers and play festive music. The villagers turn out, ready for the bureaucratic negotiation they expect from the Germans. (The old man suggests a family that Flyora can hide with, as they have lost one family member whose death might not appear on the Germans’ records.) The Germans tell them to bring toothbrushes, towels, and other goods so that they can be relocated, but almost immediately the true nature of the SS unit’s purpose manifests itself as they gleefully herd the entire population into the church and bolt the doors. The people cry out in terror and frustration and fall silent only once—when the Germans offer to let any able-bodied man live if he will leave his women and children in the church. Not a man moves or speaks—the most heroic silence I have ever seen in a film. Flyora climbs out the window and is hauled away by the Germans. A mother climbs out with a child. She is dragged away by her hair; her childr is thrown back in through the window, and then the Germans throw in grenades.
And the sequence does not end. Will not end. It seems to last forever. The soldiers use grenades, Molotov cocktails, machine guns, and finally flamethrowers, and the Germans—many clearly drunk—laugh and applaud at the antics of their inept Ukrainian collaborators, who for their part clown and pratfall and abuse their handful of prisoners. Flyora—now grey-haired, trembling with bottled up screams, his face prematurely wrinkled and his eyes set in an agonized ten-thousand-yard stare—watches.
Finally, with the screams silenced and the burning church collapsing in on itself, the Germans’ carnival atmosphere abates. They load the trucks and set off on foot. Just when we think Flyora has been forgotten, he is hauled to his feet by one of the collaborators and a group of German soldiers force Flyora to his knees. One puts a pistol to Flyora’s temple. Another casually walks up and joins them and we understand—they are posing. Flyora waits, kneeling, as another soldier indifferently winds his camera and snaps a photo. Then they push him aside and leave.
His name that sat on him was Death
The second portrait
This is not the end of Come and See, but it feels like an end—for Flyora at least. How can relief from the dread we have been experiencing through him be so cruel? How can being spared make things worse?
Flyora, when he rouses from his coma-like faint in the smoldering village, wanders again. Just outside the village he comes across the wreckage of the German column. The partisans have ambushed them and now have a handful of survivors at their mercy.
I will leave it for you to find out what happens there—as I have, despite the length and detail of this review, have still left out a lot—but this final passage leads us to the most powerful and surreal and disturbing moment in a film that is full of them.
Staggering away with his broken and still unused rifle, Flyora comes across a poster of Hitler lying in a puddle. The people of the village had produced it before the massacre as evidence of their cooperation with the Nazis, to no avail. Flyora shoulders his rifle and in an agonized fit of anger and trauma shoots the poster. Between each shot we see Hitler’s career play out in reverse, from the corpses of the Holocaust to the beginning of the war to the Nuremberg rallies to the Beer Hall Putsch to his time in the army during World War I to—
Each time Flyora fires we rush further backward through the life of the author of Flyora and his people’s suffering until Flyora is, finally, brought up short. This moment is perhaps the most famous in the movie—meaning I was expecting it—and it still wrecked me. It is the most pointed challenge to the audience I’ve ever seen in a war film and one of the few really serious moral statements I’ve ever seen played out in a movie, a seriousness made only more emphatic coming at the end of two hours of unstinting atrocity.
And Hell followed with him
Come and See is almost impossible to describe or explain without simply relating what happens, which I think is part of the point. But even a barebones recapitulation of its events—it doesn’t really have a plot, certainly not one of the Hollywood stamp—cannot convey what it is like to watch it.
A lot of that has to do with its style, which the director, Elim Klimov, very carefully designed to draw the viewer in without allowing the viewer to become comfortable. The cast are mostly amateur actors; the lead, Alexsey Kravchenko, was cast after accompanying a friend to the film’s auditions, and his performance is indescribable—the thing that holds the movie together tonally. The costumes and props, especially the weapons, look lived-in and much used, and many were apparently real World War II surplus from both sides. Several combat scenes included live ammunition, and the actors respond accordingly. This top-to-bottom authenticity is abetted by the film’s cinematography. Shot mostly with natural light and often beautiful, it sometimes wanders, following the characters via Steadicam, or holds still, waiting, allowing the viewer’s dread to build. The prolonged massacre scene is the film’s most powerful example, as documentary-style handheld blends seamlessly with carefully composed static shots. I cannot imagine that, when Spielberg came to shoot the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto in Schindler’s List, this film wasn’t on his mind.
And yet for all its realism in many regards the film is also surreal, with extended sections of impressionistic, dreamlike filmmaking. Characters stare into the camera, making eye contact with the viewer and seeming to address us directly; animals take center stage, as when a stork follows Flyora and Glasha in their wanderings or when a cow, the picture of gentle ignorance, faces death; and we get many, many closeups of Flyora’s anguished face. All of this works to unsettle the viewer, so that even the moments of relative calm thrum with foreboding. The result is apocalyptic—dreading the inevitable, we can only await its revealing.
This is the kind of film that people, because of what it portrays, rather lamely call “hard to watch.” I didn’t find it so—at least not in the sense of struggling to stay interested. It is bleak, filled with a steadily gathering and unremitting dread punctuated with indescribable horrors. It is eerie, as character after character looks unblinking into the camera, the soundtrack drones tonelessly, as utterly real imagery dissolves into the otherworldly. And it is deeply disturbing, as any film set in the bloodlands of eastern Europe during the war should be. But I did not find it “hard to watch”—which was part of its terror. Come and See arrests you from the very beginning with that dread, those images, and the world it recreates. You can’t look away, and the film doesn’t let up. It is no more hard to watch than it is to sleep through the worst kind of nightmare.
What is awful about Come and See is precisely that nightmare, which you do not so much watch as live through. The film brings us into a world in which the people live with an unimaginable burden of dread, fear, and grief and makes us feel it without offering any phony hope of rescue or relief. There is no attempt to explain or make sense of it, no theodicy or catharsis, and the ideologies and politics behind the war feel so remote from the war’s reality that the only time they intrude, near the end of the film, we feel just how unreal, how inadequate they are. And what is more, all these things actually happened to real people. An overwhelming reminder of what World War II was like for millions.
Come and See is a masterpiece, a film everyone should see once, especially those of us for whom discomfort is alien, and who would react with self-justifying rage if their world were upended. Like the scriptures it invokes, it is a challenge, and like a nightmare—or a vision, the kind of nightmare that we occasionally need—it should wake us up changed. True to its title, the film commands us to come, to see, and we behold.
