Come and See

1985 war movie

Rating: 18/20

Plot: A kid finds himself a gun so that he can join a resistance army and kill off some Nazis. He ages about thirty years in somewhere around three days.

Those who have faithfully read every word I've written know that I'm not a huge fan of war movies. I might, however, like artsy-fartsy war movies because I love the harrowing and intensely poetic Come and See, an artsy-fartsy war movie.

It begins with the first of countless close-ups. This one is the back of a guy's head as he calls for and threatens a pair of children, one of them who is about to become our main character. There are lots and lots of close-ups, and I guess they succeed in making the violence in this feel more personal. I didn't like the look of the version of this I was watching on DVD. It was a little grainy, and I was setting myself up to be bored for a hour and a quarter or so. But once this kid moves on from his house--a preceding scene showing a conflict with his mother that actually was visually interesting as the camera kind of swam around their home--things get and stay electric. This really is more haunting and more disturbing than any war movie I think I've ever seen. And honestly, the graininess might have contributed to that a bit. It definitely didn't hurt it.

Bombings that lead to deafness, the sound and camera and effects conspiring to inhabit the viewers' nightmares. Jitterbugging in the rain, a quietly trippy scene that is framed with an improbable rainbow and a stained bird. Trudging through the thickest mud, a mud with a layer of mud on top of it. One shot that only one of the two characters happened to see. Flies on dolls. A tracking shot through trees into these clusters of people leading to a haunting "I told you so" from a crispy man. A Nazi skull used to assemble a terrifying effigy with a creation that strangely foreshadows some stuff in the climax. A single-shot cow theft. That same cow's eye as the animal's going and going and gone. Oppressive fog. A church filled with abject fear, the kind of chaos that is almost given order by the screams. A rubbery-faced old lady in a bed, burning structures in the background. A pair of pictures set up and taken, one of them with stillness fooling me into thinking it was a photograph until the wind blew some cloth around. Legs covered in dried blood. An extinguished torch. German soldiers emerging from a fog-drenched truck that functions like a clown car. All of those explosions. Liquidy fire splashed on the ground. That Nazi's pet marmot or whatever that animal was. An assault on a framed picture half-covered in mud and the ensuing manipulated stock footage imagery.

It's poetic image after poetic image, but the sound plays just as important a role as the visuals. It's complete experimental pandemonium at times, and you fear for the actors and the cows. This isn't Tarkovsky, but the imagery recalls a Tarkovsky who's a little maniacal. There aren't any animals set on fire in this one that I recall, but this is the type of movie where it felt like animals should have been set on fire.

I'm not advocating for the burning of live animals, by the way. I want to make that clear.

The main character is nearly in every scene, and it's an amazing job by a kid giving his first movie performance. The guy's name is Aleksey Kravchenko. He would have been 16 when this came out, and Kravchenko says that the filming was such a strain on him physically and emotionally that he came back to school much thinner and with gray hair. I know I keep using the word haunting, but I have a limited vocabulary, and "haunting" is just the perfect word to capture Kravchenko's performance. He's very much a kid in those early scene, even when you find out that he's looking for a rifle buried on the beach so that he can run off to kill people. But as his story progresses, he just keeps looking impossibly older. Lines appear on his face, and his hair really does look grayish. The film's in color, but the longer this kid's story goes on, the more and more black and white he appears. I'm not sure how this kid's mind survived the filmed atrocities that Elem Klimov put him through.

Speaking of Klimov, this was his last movie. It probably gave him a few gray hairs, too. He would have been in his early-50s when this came out, and the decision to not make movies was a personal one. I don't know anything about his previous work although his biopic about Rasputin and a satirical comedy about camp children called Welcome, or No Trespassing look like things I'll need to check out.

If I made a list of "most disturbing" movie experiences, this one would be a candidate. If that sounds like your kind of thing, this is must-see stuff. I have a bad movie memory, but I'm not likely to forget some of the things Elem Klimov made me see in this movie.