Cheap Come and See (DVD) (Aleksei Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Liubomiras Lauciavicius) (Elem Klimov) Price

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Customer Reviews of Come and See

Harrowing realism; reflects director's wartime experience
Elem Klimov directed this masterpiece with passion. His experience of World War II translates to film as mind-pummeling realism. Come and See puts to shame many war films that attempt realism through special effects. Klimov used real explosives and bullets (what!) in filming many of these scenes. Klimov feared the young actor in the lead was too young to effectively dramatize the WWII experience, so he hypnotized the boy to elicit deeper engagement. Older Russians, deeply moved, embraced the young actor at the close of the premiere. I saw this film nearly 20 years ago in an "art theater" and the print was terrible. So bad that it appeared to be in black-and-white. No matter. The film knocked the wind out of me: I was completely absorbed in the unpleasant experience. I bought the Kino 2-disc DVD version a few years ago and was amazed at the quality of the picture. The supplements are very interesting: some historical documentaries (with shocking footage) and interviews with film cast/crew. I don't have direct experience of war, but in my humble opinion, this film may come closer than most to giving the viewer an indirect experience of the terror of war. And it may be a film for younger Russians to get an idea of what the grandparents went through. Viewer discretion advised.

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A powerful war movie
Made in the last years of the Soviet Empire, this 1985 study of the horrors of war by director Elem Klimov is a frank and brutal account of a kind difficult to find in the film libraries of Hollywood. The story is of a young boy caught up in the Nazi invasion of rural Byelorussia. Despite its provenance, the film is not at all propagandistic. While it does not touch on the shortcomings of the Soviet side, these are in fact outside its scope and what it does cover has an entirely truthful air. Western war movies often show war as a stage for heroism or tragedy, in which, however horrible the backdrop, the moral lives of the protagonists still take the foreground. This reflects not only the nature of the entretainment industry but perhaps also the character of the shorter and smaller war on the Western Front. The Eastern Front was different. Simply put, it was the most destructive war ever waged, running for four long years over an enormous area between two totalitarian regimes whose overriding goal was to totally exterminate each other. The savagery of this merciless struggle and the scope of its catastrophic casualty levels has never been fully acknowledged in Western popular culture. The young hero in this film is no a hero at all, but rather a shocked witness to the almost unimaginable degree of brutality which Nazism represented. One feels that this film shows what the Eastern Front must really have been like. Unfortunately, those most likely to see it probably already have some understanding of what it depicts while those for whom it might be an eye-opener will probably never hear of it (this film currently has 23 reviews on Amazon; Saving Private Ryan has 1,068).

The film is well-paced, the cinematography is good, with lyrical and beautiful moments away from the carnage, and the colour is excellent. The DVD does not have too much in the way of extras, although it does include an endorsement by Sean Penn - a pointed comment on the relative merits of this film against the usual Hollywood product - which may make some viewers interested in checking it out.

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COME AND SEE (Elem Klimov,1985) released by RUSCICO
In 1943 Byelorussia, Florya (Aleksei Kravchenko), a 14-year-old boy who is eager to fight the Germans, goes off to join the Russian army, against the pleadings of his mother. But the regiment makes him stay behind at the camp, and he wanders off on his own, joined by a peasant girl (Olga Mironova). Rendered partially deaf by aerial bombardment, and evading capture from German paratroopers, he tries to return home, but fate guides him to a band of partisans, after which his journey leads him ever deeper into the inferno of the Nazi invasion.
The picture's rigorously subjective style, hallucinatory imagery, and refusal to soften or glamorize the realities of war, makes it something of a milestone in the Soviet World War II film, a genre distinguished, at its best, by a sense of grief over the great tragedy of that conflict, which killed an estimated twenty million Russians. In Byelorussia, the Germans systematically wiped out hundreds of towns, rounding men, women, and children into barns and burning them alive. By depicting these horrific events through the eye of a naive boy, Klimov gives them immediacy, elevating them above the mere recounting of historical fact into the heightened realm of an actual witnessing, where they appear strange, grotesque, and unbearable.
Kravchenko's almost wordless performance is riveting. Over the course of the film we see his face become aged beyond his years, hardening into a mask of fear and trauma that reflects every atrocity he has seen and endured. The film is constantly directing our attention to people's faces, their expressions, their stares and glances, which visually emphasizes the fact that all these horrors are happening to people, to someone, the unutterable limits of inhumanity experienced in the souls and feelings of living beings. Klimov doesn't let the viewer detach to contemplate psychology or motivation, but brings us down to the stark level of survival, where his young protagonist lives.
Sometimes the images are lyrical, as in the brilliant sequence in a forest where Florya and the girl are hiding. The girl dances in the rain, a stork wanders through a clearing -- the beauty is tinged with fear and ominous foreboding. When Florya is deafened, the movie's soundtrack is muffled, and the music and sound effects express his disorientation and maddening inability to connect with what's going on around him. At key moments, Klimov always chooses an unexpected image or shot, startling us out of ordinary perception and keeping us on edge, as in the scene when Florya and a partisan are stealing a cow and come under fire, and we suddenly see a close-up of the cow's eye, another uncomprehending creature subjected to the merciless insanity of this world.
Come and See (even the title alludes to our role as witnesses, willing or not) is a deeply unsettling experience. This is a film designed to shake you to the core of your being, a vision of what life looks like when all we know and cherish is savagely uprooted, when love and morality are ripped away and humans turn into beasts. In one of the film's most daring flourishes, Florya vents his rage on a symbol -- a picture of Hitler -- and with each gunshot Klimov moves the newsreel images of history backwards, undoing in fantasy what can never be undone, until we are left with the haunting face of a child. The shooting stops; we can never go back, but we will never -- should never -- forget.

P.S. To watch the movie preview video clip you can on russianDVD.com website for free.