Come and See [DVD] [1985]

This is not a typical war film. It seemed to me to play out like a horror movie for the most part, and I do love horror movies! There are few actual firefights during the course of this movies 137 minutes, but there are scenes where characters are shot at and mortared. The director used real ammunition in the film, and this creates a truly frightening display of war, with tracers flashing across the sky and cutting trees to shreds, and shells blowing earth and shrapnel into the sky. The scene near the beginning where Florya, the main character, narrowly escapes a bombing in the forest, is hallucinogenic and disturbing in its portrayal of the boy being shell-shocked. The film follows Florya from the time he is found digging in the earth for a rifle so that he can become a Partisan in the Russian Army and through the madness of war-time Byelorussia.There are some negative points in this film. The first is that the English dubbing is, at least to begin with, laughable. At the opening the English voiceovers are unbelievably bad. Don't turn on the subtitles though, and watch it in its original Russian; you soon overcome this fact when you are drawn into Florya's horrific experiences, which soon begin. The subtitles distracted me from viewing so I turned them off.Another gripe I have with this film is a slight discontinuity error, but perhaps I missed something. After Florya has joined the Partisan's in the forest, and they head out on their march, Florya is re-joined wandering through a swampy forest alone and in tears. I wondered how he came unattached from the other Partisans.But this is where the sheer horror of his tale begins. He meets a girl, Gasha alone and also crying in the wood. They share a strange moment of insanity, and this sequence was quite hard to follow. But it soon picks up again when Florya returns to his home village, and there the true terrible horror of war is brought home to him when he discovers that the whole village has been slaughtered. The horror continues for Florya, and the expression on the young actors face makes me wish I spoke Russian so I could watch it and hear his words as he expressed them during the most disturbing scenes.This is an unforgettable film, rife with terror and atrocity. The penultimate sequence where the SS invade a small village and herd them into a shed before torching it- Florya being the only one to escape the fate- is monstrous. Throughout the film Florya is constantly dogged by a German plane flying overhead with a hideous buzzing. This is one of the many grotesque experiences of the main character, and at the end his face is visibly aged. This is a highly recommended film, for anyone who has the nerves to see it. I think this is a classic movie and horror movie fans and war film fans alike should see this film as soon as possible.

It's a good film but very slow. I expected a steaming rollercoaster epic, a cross between Schindler's List and Dr Zhivago, but was very disappointed. B Rate bargain bucket. Life's too short to watch it twice.

There is much to recommend this film, but there is much about it that can be criticised, too.If you are so stupid as to believe all the hype that films like Saving Private Ryan, Bridge Too Far etc really get to the "truth of war" then this film is going to be a shock (but then if you are really that gullible, just about everything is going to be a shock). If you already knew that war is genuinely nasty, evil and unpleasant, then this film is far from shocking and makes its point in a ponderous and melodramatic manner. It is heavy handed in its treatment of the horror of war lacking every ounce of subtlety that went into films such as Bertrand Tavernier's Life and Nothing But.German attrocities during the invasion of Russia went beyond the believable and would certainly challenge any sane film censor, so no matter how determined the film maker to re-create reality, short of actually burning a village load of peasants while the cameras are running, there is no way of portraying the horror of war except through some form of metaphor, analogy or clever cinematic device. That's where this film falls down. Kravchenko heaps all the horror into the effect it has on one young man. He is deafened and sent part mad, but it is never clear if he is really sent mad or whether that is just a device and the only way we know he is effected is through his constant wide-eyed staring into the camera. Shots are held too long, the pregnant metaphors are too brutal and the "I've been deafened by high-explosives" sound track is an idea that should have been dropped after fifteen minutes or so.But the most difficult aspect of the whole film is the central character. He is a twit, right from the start, grinning inanely at the chance to join the partisans and then stupidly surprised at everything that happens thereafter. He does not one single thing to gain the respect, admiration or sympathy of the audience and his frequent escape from violent death and destruction becomes increasingly far-fetched as the film progresses. From a state of self-pitying inaction, he suddenly becomes one of only two people who take the offered opportunity to escape from the doomed church. So not only is his character unsympathetic, it is also unbelievable.This may be a worthy piece of fiction, showing aspects of the oft-glorified WWII that we rarely get to see, but it is still fiction and judged by those standards, the central character isn't strong enough.

As time goes by, the importance and greatness of this film become ever more apparent. By following the journey of an idealist teenager, over what seems to be just a few days, we have shown to us the realities of the Russian home front in 1943 - as the SS rolled across the landscape. The title 'Come and See' from the Book of Revelation tells you what just to expect - but nothing can actually prepare you. Of course being a film, this is art too - it has contrasting beauty, it has 'heroic' defiance as well as cowardice, and it has a central performance that etches itself into your memory. We see events not just happen to the boy, but we see them literally get written onto his face. By the end we are staring at an old man - lined, craggy, and all knowing.Will just mention one image - a scene where SS officers line up for photo session in the midst of their handiwork, using the boy as a prop. That image as they stop for the camera click is surely one of the greatest in all cinema - taken to the level of true greatness by the simple glint of sun in the goggles of one of the soldiers.Of course, when this was made it was almost an historical document - showing us what happened. But the true shock - and why this film reverberates even more today than when it was made, is that since then we've had to invent the phrase 'ethnic cleansing'. What is truly difficult to cope with is that as I write the events I am witnessing on screen are are not 'then' they are 'now' and apparently part of the human condition.Come and See indeed.