‘Come & See’: Elem Klimov’s Nightmarish WWII Movie Is An Unflinching Masterpiece Finally Available Via Criterion

Evoking realism, hyperrealism, and the surreal, Elem Klimov’s nightmarish, technically marvelous 1985 movie “Come and See,” is a mesmerizing and legendary, if little-seen, WWII masterpiece that finally received its due earlier this summer thanks to the Criterion Collection.

Based upon the novel “I Am from the Fiery Village” by Ales Adamovich —Klimov’s haunting, horrors-of-war epic shatters the senses throughout and suggests an unholy alliance between the works of Stanley Kubrick’s bravura filmmaking and Terrence Malick’s artful poeticism, but in reality, preceded both “Full Metal Jacket” (1987) and “The Thin Red Line” (1998)— and Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (1998) for that matter. And it’s a towering work that stands firmly besides those giants in the pantheon of greatest war films of all time.

Relying on the unnerving intimacy of the camera and the ideas of experiencing real-time horrors and traumas as they unfold, unlike those examples, and another anti-war film “Paths of Glory,” “Come and See” is told from the perspective of a child. Before filming, Klimov considered the emotional damage his film might wreak on a young performer. To avoid his film mirroring Flyora’s wrenching loss of virtue, in a meta sense, he cast a first-time performer, in Aleksey Kravchenko as the lead. Believing Kravchenko’s lack of training might shield him from contorting himself to the role.

While war might make adults into listless monsters, bandaging their own emotional lacerations with violence, in times of turmoil, the children caught in the middle experience similar distress. In many harrowing sequences, Klimov’s unflinching “Come and See” depicts a brutal, yet hypnotic bloodletting of their innocence. Set in Belorussia 1943, two boys from a small village dig in the ground despite the warnings of their village elder. In the sandy landscape, and former battleground, German helmets, and belts litter the earth. But the older boy Flyora (Kravchenko) isn’t searching for trinkets. He’s looking for a rifle so he might join the Belorussian partisans fighting against the German army. When the pair gleefully discover a firearm, and a German operated reconnaissance plane spots them, they innocently wave, setting off a ghastly chain of events leading to one of the most striking loss-of-innocence movies ever witnessed.

By positioning the perils of war away from the soldier’s perspective to a child’s, Klimov crafts “Come and See” into one of the most visceral expressions of war’s emotional carnage — carnage enacted by unending violence, the loss of elders, and the surrealness of death.

Throughout “Come and See,” Klimov and cinematographer Aleksei Rodionov plunge the viewer into the despair, and relentlessly appalling dehumanization, relying on immersive long takes and deep depth of field to capture what Flyora’s childlike senses ignore. With his suitcase tied to his back, dressed in a pristine blue suit, and his scavenged rifle at his side, Flyora displays a buoyant boyish step when he arrives at the partisans’ forested camp. Here, his naiveté blinds him to the violence ensuing on his periphery, like the pains of a hospital-ridden man loudly begging the doctors not to skin him alive. Or the specter of a soon-to-be shot deserter, led away shirtless from the camp by his former comrades.

Instead, he turns his gaze to the jovial photoshoot taking place on the outer edges, whose particulars mesh the macabre within propagandist imagery. There, a photographer impersonating Hitler composes a myriad of subjects among the compendium of soldiers: a man with a bandaged face sits in front, a bear-sized fighter rests beside him, a commander sits on a purposely defective chair for a pratfall, and a cow — with the phrase “Eat me before the Germans do” painted across its side — takes a prime position in the foreground, too. One could imagine Flyora, and many other boys, smitten with war after seeing a similar photo posterized on a building in their village. It’s no wonder why, when the photographer invites Flyora into the photoshoot because of his nice suit, he stands beaming while the partisans sing “The Sacred War,” a song like most national anthems, partly composed to indoctrinate the youth. Though Soviet Union censors combed through Klimov’s script for eight years before production could begin, as evident by the filmmaker’s interest in propaganda, the director never deifies the partisans. Instead, he shows them as chewing up and spitting out “battle-ready” children with no regard for their age or safety.

Throughout “Come and See,” Klimov charts Flyora’s emotional turmoil by employing fourth-wall-breaking extreme close-ups. One of the more endearing examples occurs when Commander Kosack (Vladas Bagdona) leaves Flyora behind after the partisan departs. Alone and heartbroken, Flyora befriends an older girl named Glasha (Olga Mironova). The pair bond by happily prancing through the Edenic forest until a cacophony of horrors intrudes upon their quiet peace. A deluge of bombs drop, and their explosions desolate trees into projectiles, causing Flyora and Glasha to scramble for their lives. The disturbing sequence acutely demonstrates Klimov’s vision of war. For him, the horror of the conflict sprouts not just from the carnage, but how closely the idyllic nestles inside the hyperrealistic. For instance, the juxtaposition of one close-up — a clean-faced impish Flyora smiling at Glasha before the bombing — and another — his dirty and bruised, blood-stained visage trembling with shock — occur within five minutes of each other.

The salvo of bombs turns Flyora to his next heartbreak. When he returns to his village with Glasha, Flyora finds his family missing. Here, Klimov mixes realism with the surreal. Upon entering his house, Flyora is oblivious to the flies buzzing around; his sister’s dolls hauntingly placed in the center of the room, and the still-lit candle barely ablaze at the stump. His boyish naivete lets him imagine the rotten food in the supposedly still-warm pot — even after Glasha spits the morsels out in disgust — is fresh. Klimov combines the haunting mise en scène with the nightmarish when Flyora and Glasha run from his home to the village’s hideaway island in search of his family. In a film filled with an array of devastating tracking shots, while the pair run, Klimov cuts to Glasha’s perspective to capture the sight of dead bodies piled behind Flyora’s home. Another example of Flyora’s boyish naivete initially shielding him from war’s horrors.

In a scene closely resembling the Slough of Despond in “The Pilgrim’s Progress”—another story about a young man departing from home—Klimov fashions a nightmare through his haunting sound design, as the pair’s screams into the void are drowned by the soundscape of birds. And when the pair arrive on the island, and the village elder blames Flyora for the town’s destruction, the weight of war’s consequences finally hits him. No more is war a boyhood game of valor and medals. Its travesties are real, and the dead are more real.

During filming, Klimov used live ammunition that purportedly buzzed within six inches of the actor. Kravchenko demonstrates the emotional injuries to Flyora with incredible candor including one indelible scene where he takes cover behind a cow’s carcass as the sky turns ablaze, orange with machine gunfire. Following the death of his mother, and the abandonment of a Commander, by the time his last partisan superiors dies—Flyora’s last adult figure to look up to— he’s completely broken. From there, the young boy’s shattered psyche wanders into one massacre after another.

In one particular dreadful moment, following many atrocities, where Nazi soldiers prepare for a gang-raping, Flyora is grabbed by the collar as Nazis pose with his spiritually gutted body for a photo-op. He’s a trophy. A signifier of the ways war annihilates children: whether through a church fire or the destruction of the soul.

Often a hallucinogenic feverish dream, “Come and See” sears war’s transfixing yet devastating images and sounds into the viewer’s mind: the ghostly death-soaked village; the heavy hallucinogenic nightmare bog; the orange gunfire-lit sky; and the wailing of burning children amid a hedonistic celebration. By telling the story from a child’s perspective, Klimov gives the horrors of war a new kind of immediacy. Not one born from stern men turned tragically hollow, but from a pure spirit prematurely drained of their innocence. By capturing the strain on Flyora’s face in each haunting and mesmeric close-up; by sizing the cathartic expressions of grief; and war’s compulsion for death, Klimov created the existential war film to end all existential war films, and an underseen triumph that should be considered compulsory, must-see cinema. [A]