Come and See (1985)

The War Film That Leaves a Mark

Come and See is the most devastating war film ever made. I rate it a 10, and it’s a film most people can only bring themselves to watch once. Both of those things are true for the same reason. It doesn’t show war as an adventure, a tragedy with heroes or a lesson with a comforting moral. It shows a boy walking into the machinery of extermination and coming out the other side with the face of an old man.

Elem Klimov directed it, and it came out in 1985, for the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. He had fought for years with Soviet censors to make it, and after it was released he never directed another film. He said he felt he had done everything he could do in cinema. After watching it, you understand why.

This isn’t a review in the usual sense. It’s an attempt to say what the film does and why it matters, without describing its worst moments in more detail than they need. Anyone who wants to know exactly what happens can watch it.

Flyora

The film opens in 1943, in German-occupied Belarus. Two boys dig in the sand of a battlefield, looking for a rifle, so that they can join the Soviet partisans fighting in the forests. One of them, Flyora, finds one, and he’s delighted. His mother begs him not to go. He goes anyway, cheerful and proud, with the rifle over his shoulder.

Aleksei Kravchenko was fourteen when he played Flyora, and he had never acted before. At the start of the film he’s a round-faced, grinning boy who sees war as an adventure and a chance to be a man. The whole film is the story of what happens to that face.

The partisans take him in, and then leave him behind when they move out, because he’s too young and too inexperienced. It’s his first humiliation, and it saves his life, for a while. He cries with frustration as he watches them march away, and the audience, who know what’s coming, feel something closer to relief.

Glasha and the Forest

Left alone at the partisan camp, Flyora meets Glasha, a teenage girl who has been living with the partisans. Olga Mironova plays her with a strange, fey quality, laughing, dancing in the rain, talking about love and the future. For a short, strange stretch, the film becomes almost lyrical: two young people in a forest, in the middle of a war, trying to be children.

Then the camp is bombed. The attack is terrifying, shot from ground level with trees splintering and earth erupting, and Flyora is left partly deaf. The soundtrack, from this point on, is often muffled, ringing and distorted, and we hear the world the way he does. It’s one of the most effective uses of sound in any film, and it puts the audience inside his body for the rest of the story.

Flyora and Glasha make their way back to his village, and find it empty. Flyora insists his family must be hiding. Glasha looks back and sees what he refuses to see, and they run. Klimov never shows us directly. He shows us her face, and the brief glimpse she gets over her shoulder is enough.

The Bog

The two of them, desperate to reach safety, wade through a bog to an island where the surviving villagers have taken refuge. Few sequences in any film are as exhausting: the two young people sinking, struggling, crying and dragging themselves through the mud, for what feels like an eternity.

Klimov doesn’t cut away. He makes us wade with them. By the time they reach the island, Flyora has broken, and he has begun to understand what has happened to his mother and sisters. His face has started to change. The grin of the opening scene has gone, and it won’t come back. Klimov keeps his camera close, and every scene from here on is partly a study of that face.

On the island, the villagers tell him the truth, and he turns on them in rage and grief, and then collapses. It’s the moment his childhood ends. Everything that follows is seen through the eyes of someone who has already lost everything, and the film never lets him, or us, recover.

The Hunt for Food

The partisans send Flyora with a small group to find food for the starving villagers, and the group walks into a minefield and is killed one by one. Flyora survives and, with another man, steals a cow from a farm. They’re caught in the open by German fire, and the cow is killed, and Flyora hides behind its body, sobbing.

These sequences are harrowing in a quieter way than the rest of the film. There are no great battles, no heroism, only hunger, fear and the random death of anyone who happens to be standing in the wrong place. Flyora has stopped being a soldier. He’s a boy trying to survive. The rifle he dug up so proudly at the start has become a burden, and the war he wanted to join has turned out to be nothing like the stories.

The Village

Flyora ends up in a village called Perekhody at the moment a German unit arrives to destroy it. He’s swept up with the villagers, who are herded into a wooden barn. What happens next is the center of the film, and it’s the reason Come and See is unlike any other war film.

I won’t describe it in detail. The Germans and their collaborators make a show of the destruction, playing music, laughing, taking photographs. The barn is set on fire. Flyora is pulled out, forced to pose for a photograph with a gun to his head, and then abandoned. He watches the village burn.

Klimov films it in long, unbroken takes, and he refuses to look away. The film isn’t interested in suspense or spectacle. It wants the audience to witness what happened, and to feel what Flyora feels, and it makes that impossible to escape. It’s the hardest sequence I’ve ever sat through in a film, and I don’t think it could have been made any other way.

The History

This isn’t invention. During the German occupation of Belarus, hundreds of villages were destroyed in exactly this way, often with their populations inside, as part of a deliberate campaign against partisans and civilians. The most famous is Khatyn, whose memorial stands today. A caption at the end of the film says 628 Belarusian villages were burned, along with all their inhabitants.

The screenplay was co-written by Ales Adamovich, a Belarusian writer who had fought with the partisans as a teenager and who had collected survivors’ testimony about the burned villages. His books, and the testimony in them, are the foundation of the film. Klimov and Adamovich wanted the audience to understand that this happened and to remember the dead.

That’s where the title comes from. It’s taken from the Book of Revelation, where each of the four horsemen is introduced with the words come and see. The film is an invitation to witness. It asks the audience to look at what happened and not turn away. It’s exactly what the survivors asked of Adamovich when they told him their stories.

The Face

Aleksei Kravchenko’s face is the film’s most famous image. By the end, the round, grinning boy of the opening is haggard, grey, lined and hollow-eyed, like an old man. No makeup could achieve it entirely. Klimov shot the film in chronological order, and Kravchenko’s exhaustion and distress were real.

There are many stories about the filming, some of them probably exaggerated: that live ammunition was used in some scenes, that Kravchenko was hypnotised to protect him from the trauma, that his hair turned grey. What’s clear is that the young actor was put through a terrible ordeal. His performance ranks with the finest ever given by a child.

Kravchenko went on to a long acting career in Russia. He has said that the experience of making the film stayed with him for the rest of his life. He understood only later what Klimov had been asking of him. Watching his eyes in the final scenes, it’s hard to believe he was acting at all.

The Ending

After the village, the partisans catch the unit responsible and hold a makeshift trial in a field. The collaborators beg and blame each other. The German officer explains, calmly, why whole peoples must be destroyed. The partisans execute them. It’s played without triumph. Nothing that happens in that field can undo the barn, and everyone there knows it.

Then Flyora, alone, finds a framed portrait of Hitler in a puddle and begins to shoot it. As he fires, the film cuts to newsreel footage running backwards: the war undoing itself, the rallies reversing, the armies retreating, and Hitler growing younger and younger until he’s a baby in his mother’s arms. Flyora stops. He can’t shoot the baby.

It’s the most extraordinary ending I know. After everything the film has shown, it asks whether the evil could have been stopped at its source, and Flyora’s answer, even now, is that he won’t kill a child. Then he runs to rejoin the partisans, and the camera follows them into the forest as Mozart’s Requiem plays.

What Come and See Gets Right

Because it does what almost no war film has the courage to do: it refuses to make war exciting. There’s no heroic charge and no glorious sacrifice. There’s a boy, a rifle, a forest and a village, and the unimaginable cruelty of an occupying army toward people who couldn’t defend themselves. The film makes the audience feel that cruelty as something that was done to real people, in real places, within living memory.

It’s also a masterpiece of filmmaking: the sound, the long takes, the direct looks into the camera, the use of real locations and non-professional actors, the color drained almost to nothing. Every technique is used to put the audience inside Flyora’s experience and hold them there. It’s not a film to enjoy. It’s a film to endure and remember, and it deserves to be seen, once, by everyone who wants to understand what that war was.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Come and See

Yes, once, with full attention and knowing what you’re going into. It’s a 10. It’s the most important war film ever made. It’s also extremely distressing. It’s not a film to watch casually or with young people. Watch it to understand, not to be entertained.

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