MOVIE REVIEW: COME AND SEE.

 

I WATCHED A REMARKABLE MOVIE the other day called Come and See. Often cited as one of the greatest anti-war films ever made, this 1985 motion picture, directed by Russian filmmaker Elem Klimov, is set in what is now Belarus, during the German invasion of Russia in the Second World War. Using mostly non-professional actors and local villagers, Klimov presents movie audiences with an unflinching view of war and the effects it has on combatants and civilians alike. The story centres around a young boy named Floyra who is anxious to join the partisan resistance fighting against the invading Germans. Because he is so young, the militia leader Kosach leaves him behind to guard their camp while the rest go off to fight in the war. It’s here that Floyra meets the lovelorn Glasha and the two teens bond in a brief interlude that is at times both playful and erotic. Glasha, who was Kosach’s lover, taunts and teases the adolescent Floyra and then in a serious moment says to him, in a speech referencing the movie’s title:   

“Why don’t you say something? Why can’t you see me? I’m right here. I exist. Here I am…You’re not living. You don’t hear birds singing. You’re deaf and blind. Here I am. Here.…I want to love. I want to have children. Do you hear?” (Glasha to Flyora.)

 

BUT, their youthful idyll is soon interrupted by the invaders’ bombs and bullets. German advance-guard troops enter the woods where the teenagers are hiding. The soldiers are calm and methodical as they search for the partisan camp. Their demeanour is casual and businesslike. They walk with confidence, occasionally firing their weapons and passing within feet of the terrified teens who hide under debris in a bomb crater. After the soldiers move on, Flyora and Glasha flee, first to Floyra’s village, where he discovers his family and many of his neighbours have been murdered by the advancing infantry. They then flee to a local marsh where survivors from Flyora’s village are hiding.* The two become separated when Flyora goes on a failed mission¹ in search of food for the desperate villagers. He is subsequently aided by a farmer and taken to another village. Eventually the Germans arrive, and he is put in a barn with everyone else. BY THIS POINT, Flyora knows they are doomed. He has seen how the Germans treat their captives and he tries in vain to warn the villagers of their peril.

SEEMINGLY ON A WHIM the invaders allow anyone who has no children to exit the barn. It is a callous ploy, a cynical game to see whether parents will abandon their children to save themselves. However, only a terrified Flyora climbs out to be taken prisoner by German soldiers who continue to pour into the area.  A child is passed through a window into a woman's waiting arms  only to be tossed back inside by the guards. The woman is then dragged by her hair past a line of laughing soldiers out to where she will be gang-raped (as is Glasha) during the long hours of that fateful day.

 

WITH HORROR and FASCINATION, we “see” a bizarre, lunatic spectacle unfold before our eyes. This is the movie’s centre. It is where Klimov draws us to from earlier scenes where the only evidence of the advancing Germans are overflights by a reconnaissance plane, distant explosions, a small squad of storm troopers in the woods, reports from scattered refugees, sporadic nighttime gunfire until, at last, the main body of the invading army arrives. Now the invaders are everywhere. And what we (and Flyora) witness  can only be described as a carnival of the damned.

IT IS A LONG SCENE, comprising most of the final third of the film, yet it depicts events spanning barely more than a day. And it is relentless in its portrayal of the brutality and madness of war. I WAS REMINDED of the parade scene at the end of Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini’s 8½, or The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman where Death dances as he leads the doomed away from the land of the living. Klimov’s depiction of the destruction of the village and the torture and murder of its inhabitants is no less surreal. Indeed, it resembles in tone and intensity the wild antics, the fun and frolic of a carnival—at least for the Germans. Yet, it is also a place where DARK PSYCHES are unbound. It is where we watch the soldiers corral and trick the villagers into one location. Everything is in motion, a chaotic flurry of loudspeakers shouting announcements, music blaring, trucks and armoured vehicles arriving, orders and directions given, and demonstrations of what happens when they’re not obeyed quickly enough, namely a bullet to the brain. Klimov’s camera moves throughout the area, capturing rape and murder and, perhaps most disturbingly, many instances of casual, almost indifferent, cruelty and violence. 

 

YOUNG FLYORA witnesses it all and is temporarily made mad by the chaos and depravity surrounding him. And because he is so young and physically unimpressive, and so obviously cowed into a state of near catatonia by all he sees—at the utter incomprehensiveness and unreasoning madness  around him as his world is torn apart and upended—the German soldiers treat him as little more than a whipped cur, not worth bothering about, harmless, hardly noticeable. THE FILM’S ICONIC IMAGE is of Flyora, a gun to his head and a finger-pull from death, kneeling in front of several German soldiers who use him as a prop for a group photo, after which they cast him aside as not worth the expenditure of even a single bullet. Like his name, which derives from the Latin flora (“flower”), Flyora is merely a decoration for the invaders, as uninteresting to them as vase of wilted flowers. It’s his passivity that saves him, that and being seen as an object of little worth or interest. For the viewer, of course, the boy’s name connotes fragility, innocence, and beauty, and his worthiness is seen in his humanity, something that he manages to keep throughout the movie.

 

THERE IS AN INTERESTING earlier scene where Flyora and Glasha come upon a group of villagers hiding in a local marsh on a small islet.¹ At one point around dusk, the villagers perform a ritual where they march slowly behind a man carrying a kind of scarecrow made with a human skull and dressed as a German soldier. Afterwards, the same villager, a partisan fighter, carries this strange object with him as a kind of totem to guard and guide his group of scavengers (which includes Flyora) in their quest to find food for their people. Like a scarecrow in a farmer’s field, the macabre figure is meant to ward off or frighten the Germans. It doesn’t, of course, but the fact that he and the villagers adopt such rituals and “magical thinking” is in keeping with their experiences. For them, the invading Germans and their barbaric cruelty are incomprehensible and beyond their understanding. For all intents and purposes, they are demons or devils, and are to be treated and feared as such.  

LATER IN THE VILLAGE, the scene comes to a horrible climax as the German troops open fire on the barn packed with villagers, shooting their weapons until there are no more screams to be heard inside. They then set the structure alight, and we watch Flyora’s face frozen in a grimace of horror and disbelief as flames soar into the night sky, then over the passing hours fade to embers and ash and burnt timbers in the dark of early morning. From dusk till dawn the boy watches the barn burn, while around him the soldiers rape and pillage, drink, and gamble, and take photos of themselves as if they were on holiday. They hide their criminal acts behind masks of bravado, neither acknowledging their complicity nor feeling any compunction about covering up their crimes afterwards by eliminating any witnesses. Had the exhausted Flyora not collapsed into unconsciousness and appear to be dead, he would surely have been shot by the soldier who rides by on his motorcycle kicking the boy to see if he is still alive. Throughout that terrible day and night, the soldiers act with an almost demonic glee, their sense of proportion and decency gone, lifted from them as if the bonds of society and humanity were never part of them to begin with. Other soldiers--the officers--watch and evaluate, they give orders, change tactics, keep everything on schedule, ensuring their deadly assignment is a success. They seem almost sane. 

 

AND AT SUNRISE the soldiers climb aboard their jeeps and trucks and armoured carriers, their mission of mayhem and murder complete and the village destroyed. Now they are free to move on to the next one.² So it goes.

 

AND, OF COURSE, in that same theatre of war, some seventy years later, the dogs of war are once more let loose, and we are fortunate if we are watching from the sidelines as armies march and bombs fall. But I think that we don’t really see what is happening. IMAGINE you are forced to flee as tanks and troops move into your town. Your house is destroyed in a missile attack, your life and livelihood blown to smithereens in the blink of an eye. It doesn’t matter which side did it. Your life is changed in that one instant. As are the lives of your neighbours and everyone you know. If you are lucky no one you love has been killed.

 

I’m reading PERHAPS THE STARS, Ada Palmer's final volume in her Terra Ignota science fiction series. The narrator, “[anonymous]”, is tasked with chronicling the events leading up to the world-wide “civil war” that launched its opening salvos at the end of book three. Our narrator composes and posts online an essay they have written about how faith in our own “rightness” can have terrible consequences and how, in the pursuit of so-called  righteous goals, we can all too easily leave behind our humanity, like the Germans in Come and See. Then they say:

 

“Then I wrote an essay ‘On Fanaticism’ (based on Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique portatif) in which I argued that war’s atrocities hatch, not from any inhuman machine of war, but from human hearts when we let conviction turn into fanaticism. We are all in danger of dying it this war, but we are all also in danger of becoming authors of atrocities. The first danger we cannot avoid. But the second is entirely in our power, since each of us alone can choose whether we let fanaticism fester in us, or keep our hearts havens of Reason, Reasonableness, and Humanity.” (Perhaps the Stars, 18)

 

HISTORY doesn't have an off-ramp. We can’t circle around for another try. Events like war and violence and unnecessary death mark us as surely as tree rings mark the passage of time and the vagaries of the climate. And we can only hope that with each new ring we move further away from the one that has been so obviously marked by the madness of war.

 

Cheers, Jake.

 

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* ON THE ISLET, Flyora learns his village was targeted by the Germans as a pro-resistance enclave because he and a friend were observed by the German reconnaissance plane scrounging for weapons leftover from an earlier battle. Many from his village were executed as a result and their bodies piled against the side of a barn, including Flyora’s mother and his sisters. He goes mad with guilt and despair until he recovers himself with help from his neighbours and Glasha.     

 

¹ IN THE EVENING, Flyora and some men go in search of food for the families hiding in the marsh. Under the cover of darkness, they attempt to bring a cow back but are fired upon by unseen German snipers. We see tracer bullets whizzing overhead as the group scrambles for cover in a gully. But their mission is a failure when the cow is killed, leaving Flyora the only survivor. Note: we never see the Germans firing on them. We only see the muzzle flash of their guns and hear the whizzing and pinging of bullets. I think Limov does this to portray the German soldiers as a kind of mysterious, all-seeing ‘force of nature’ who dominate any people or landscape they encounter, even from a great distance. The soldiers don’t investigate to see whether Flyora and his group are dead or wounded, suggesting a level of arrogance or indifference that is chilling—they simply can’t be bothered. 

It’s interesting to note Klimov uses live ammunition for this scene. Real bullets were flying scant inches above the actors’ heads! And the cow is actually killed. The creature’s grizzly death adds a further tincture of harsh reality to the movie.

THE NEXT MORNING the boy is taken to another village by a friendly farmer and disguised as one of his children until that village is in turn overrun. There seems to be no escaping the advancing Germans. And it is here Flyora witnesses the “carnival of the damned”, nearly losing his sanity as a result.

 

² As terrible as it seems, this incident is based on historical fact and survivor accounts. During WWII, in Soviet Byelorussia (today’s Belarus), over 600 villages were similarly destroyed when the German army marched into Russia. Today, for those who don’t take seriously Russia’s concerns about the current government and military in Ukraine having neo-Nazi members who openly display Nazi insignia and paraphernalia and who have undue influence in their country’s politics, those skeptics would do well to consider that, given such a history, perhaps such concerns are relevant and need to be considered when assessing Russia's current intervention in Ukraine. [See: “Azov Battalion” and “Bandarites”.]

 

AND On A Grimmer Note: The movie’s title, Come and See, besides echoing Glasha’s life-affirming plea for love and fecundity at the start of the movie, also references a famous biblical quotation from the Book of Revelations. 

IT IS SOBERING to realize we are closer than we think to breaking open the seal and unleashing forces that might all too easily spin out of control. One of the problems with free will is that the choice, inevitably, will be ours:

 

“And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, "Come and see!" And I looked and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” (KJ Bible, Rev 6. 7-8.) 

 

 

 

The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments in the King James Version. Thomas Nelson Publishers, New York, 1984. Print

Palmer, Ada. Perhaps the Stars. Tom Doherty Associates. Tor Books. Macmillan Publishing Group, New York, NY, 2021, Print.

 

 

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