A rare look at World War II from the Soviet side, Come and See is based on the real-life experiences of Ales Adamovich, who fought with Russian partisans in Belarus in 1943, when the Nazis systematically torched over 600 villages and slaughtered their inhabitants. Adamovich and director Elem Klimov co-authored the screenplay, which shows the horrors through the eyes of a 13-year-old peasant boy named Florya (Alexei Kravchenko). Over his single mother's protests, he joins the partisans, but they
leave him behind in their camp when they set off to fight the Germans. Glascha (Olga Mironova), a lovely young girl, befriends him, but the two are caught in the midst of an air raid which leaves Florya nearly deaf. Now utterly frightened, Florya and Glascha return to his village to find it in ruins, and, in one of the film's many harrowing scenes, they wade through a swamp to locate the survivors. Now committed to seek vengeance for the death of his mother and neighbors, Florya returns to the front, but finds himself in a village that's right in the path of the Nazi firestorm. A band of partisans arrive too late to save the village but in time to capture and mete out justice to several of the Nazi officers. Awarded the Grand Prix at the 1985 Moscow Film Festival, Come and See is notable as an honest and unflinching portrait of one of the darker chapters among many in the history of the World War II. ~ Tom Wiener, Rovi
Come and See, the last and most notable film made by the former Soviet director Elem Klimov, is another fusion of popular and vanguard styles, albeit put to more civic-minded use.
Stalingrad-born Elem Klimov's "Come and See" is a undiluted expression of cinematic poetry in the service of an unspeakably turbulent anti-war narrative about the 628 Byelorussian Villages burnt to the ground along with their inhabitants by the Nazis duri
In Klimov's unshakable vision, death is casual, safety is impossible and beauty is backwards: this is peerlessly gorgeous filmmaking about absolute ugliness.
Occupying territory somewhere between Ivan's Childhood and Fateless, Come And See is an intimate epic in which all the promise of adolescence is perverted by war.
It's another war film about the victims, but shot with a lot of style, as if it was an operatic nightmare. While the movie starts exploring the character of Florya. the entire second half is nazis killing russians, with a revenge fantasy playing at the end. As a war film it is a crude and direct portrayal of the
atrocities of war, but it leaves not much room for anything else, including it's characters.
February 3, 2008
Tsubaki Sanjuro
Super Reviewer
I don't recall ever seeing a more powerful anti-war film. The transformation of Florya (Aleksei Kravchenko) from an innocent boy into a battle-hardened soldier is something that must be witnessed in order to be fully appreciated.
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