Come and See
Directed by Elem Klimov
Screenplay by Elem Klimov and Ales Adamovich
DVD Release, Noveaux Pictures
REVIEW BY ALEX MILLER
This film, directed by Soviet cinema legend Elem Klimov, was originally released in cinemas in 1985 and is here re-released on a double DVD, digitally remastered from restored print.
The film's title comes from the refrain of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation: "And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and See. And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him". And death and hell do indeed follow the film's main protagonist, a young peasant boy, Florya, who joins the partisans fighting against the Nazi occupiers of Soviet Belarus.
Played in a stunning performance by Alexei Kravchenko, Florya changes before your eyes from a young boy to a wizened old man after witnessing the ritual murder by the SS of an entire village. The main subject of the film — the deliberate murder of innocent civilians in an occupied country — is extremely topical: as I write this review Israel is doing to the civilian populations of Gaza and Lebanon what Hitler's armies did to the civilian population of the Soviet Union.
Viewers would be well advised not to opt for the dubbed version on the DVD. Unbelievably, in the dubbed version the peasants, partisans and Nazis have corny American accents that could be straight out of Friends or Baywatch, and the result is totally inappropriate and unwatchable. Fortunately, though, the DVD also gives viewers the option of Russian with English subtitles, and this is definitely the way to go.
The DVD also has interviews with Klimov, Kravchenko, and other artists involved in the making of the film, as well as a couple of interesting Soviet propaganda films from World War II. The interview with the director Klimov is particularly interesting. He speaks of his experiences as a child in Stalingrad as it was being bombed by the Germans, and explains that he had to put the first version of the film on hold in the 1970s after objections from Goskino, the USSR State Committee for Cinematography. It's hard to work out what their problem could have been with this emotional tour-de-force of cinematic genius: possibly that the film is genuinely realistic, and ends not with the banal and philistine optimism beloved of the Stalinists, but with the muddied and bedraggled partisans trudging deeper into the forest as the camera trails longingly upwards to the sunlight's promise of release beyond the tops of the pine trees.
This film could never have been made in the USA: only a culture painfully aware of the realities of foreign invasion could have created it. Six-hundred-and-twenty-eight villages in Soviet Belarus were razed to the ground along with their inhabitants by the Nazis. Come and See is a cinematic masterpiece, possibly the greatest anti-war film ever produced.