The Dead Don’t Give a Damn
Elem Klimov’s Come and See

2,322 words

No one can say whether a different situation would have arisen if the Third Reich had enjoyed a longer and calmer life.
Julius Evola, Notes on the Third Reich

As they poured across the border we were cautioned to surrender.
This I could not do.
Leonard Cohen, The Partisan

In a scene from one of the Naked Gun movies, the spin-off film franchise from the famous TV series, Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley are walking out from a movie theatre laughing happily and obviously having just seen a hilarious feel-good movie. The camera pans up and we see the title of the movie on the billboard: Platoon.

The point of the gag is obviously the comedy of absurdity. You don’t laugh at war movies, not unless they are comedies which feature wartime settings, such as Good Morning, Vietnam or M*A*S*H. They are serious, emotive, and visceral experiences, portrayals of the brutality of conflict and its attendant sacrifice. War movies generally stay in lane, however. They rarely intrude into other genres. This is not the case with 1985’s Come and See, a war movie which could lay equal claim to being a horror film.

Directed by Russian Elem Klimov, Come and See is set in Belarus in 1943, at the time of the Nazi occupation. It follows a young boy as he is conscripted by the partisan Russian army and marches off to see what war is really like. The original Romanized Russian title is Idi i smotri, and is translated into English as Come and See. A Russian friend I mentioned this to tells me that she would say “Go and watch” and, indeed, the Belarusian title is Idzi I hiladzi, or, Go and See. It seems an unimportant distinction, but the war does not call the boy so much as the boy answers his own call, his ideals of patriotism and duty, and he requires the war to fit his ideals. What follows is the destruction of those ideals, along with the boy’s innocence.

As with any film produced under Soviet rule and not conforming to strict ideological protocols, it took Klimov eight years to show Come and See in its entirety. The film could hardly be any more anti-Nazi than it is, and yet that was never enough for the cultural kommissars of the Soviet Union. Russians had to come out looking morally impeccable – one of the objections was the film’s “dirty” look – and the Soviet censorship authorities doubtless had a lot of fun making filmmakers jump through hoops to burnish the image of this pathetic empire of nothing. It must be so much more enjoyable to hobble a filmmaker than a novelist, who simply goes back to his manuscript and strikes out the odd line. Film is capital-and time-intensive, and a re-edit costs a lot of both.

But, of course, when it comes to award time (and Come and See won a prestigious award at the Moscow Film Festival), the Soviets will still take the plaudits, despite their efforts to destroy the movie winning the award. Perhaps they realized what a success it would be. If nothing else, Russian film censors must get to see a lot of movies. They must develop at least some critical sensibilities. In a 2022 poll of the greatest movies of all time, the highly respected film journal Sight and Sound placed Come and See at number 41.

The film is a cinematic bildungsroman that follows a young boy, Florya, as he leaves his family to join the Belarusian partisans after digging up a rifle on the beach as his entry requirement to World War Two. He and another boy keep digging despite the warnings of an old man, and the presence of a spy-plane overhead which will return like a bird of doom throughout the movie. When Florya announces to his mother that he wants to join the army, his mother gives him an axe and tells him he may as well kill her and his two twin sisters because he is passing a death sentence on them by enlisting. This is a heart-breaking early scene which warns of the tumult to come, and the mother plays a small but devastating role which must have been repeated thousands of time in reality. At the army camp, Florya is awkwardly polite and out of place, constantly smiling with the sheer pleasure of engaging in the war, of being a part of history rather than just looking on. As the commander warns of an incoming siege, Florya is in the only one listening who wears a smile. It doesn’t last long.

The camp sends an advance guard but Florya is left behind because he is a rookie. Disconsolate, he contemplates suicide in the forest until he meets a girl, Glasha, from the next village along to his own, and there is a curious little pastoral interlude while they play in the woods like the children they are. Then, a sudden airstrike temporarily deafens Florya.

This is brilliantly done, and Florya’s hearing never fully returns during the rest of the movie. A tinnitus-like squeal comes back to haunt the boy at moments of great stress, which is pretty much the whole film. It is reminiscent of the portrayal of shell-shock in another war film that views combat from an oblique angle, Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England. Set in the English Civil War, this is a very different film from Come and See, but equally visceral in its portrayal of the effects of war on the human sensorium.

Florya and Glasha return to the boy’s village, but find no one. As Florya leaves with the girl to find his family, she looks back at his house and sees a pile of mangled corpses. From that shot onwards, things get worse exponentially. This is a film that will put the viewer through the mangle, and it is constructed in a way that is both visually brilliant, and utterly terrifying in its imagery.

The young pair cross a swamp, and as they pull themselves through the sucking, oozing mud in one long tracking shot, the viewer won’t be consoled by knowing this will be one of the movie’s easier shots to process. The cinematography is so accomplished it makes the viewer realize that a film is nothing without its camera crew and its director of photography. Come and See combines long tracking shots with short, often incongruous, surreal, and absurd images. There is thus a sense of real time, of situations building and worsening, punctuated by dream-like moments of disturbed and disturbing imagery. The final shot, a long track of a platoon of partisans marching through a forest, is a masterpiece in itself. Citizen Kane and The Player were rightly recognized for their opening long tracking shots, but as a final visual sign-off to this movie, it is as perfect as a tracking shot can get. The long tracking shot has not died in Western cinema, but filmgoers have become so used to migraine-inducing jump-cuts that we don’t seem to know any better now, and tracking seems increasingly a European expertise.

Now set on their journey, Florya and Glasha come across villagers who have mounted a skull on a pole and dressed it in a German greatcoat and Iron Cross. They spit on it and insult it, then daub the skull in clay to fashion a mask of Hitler’s face. With soot-blackened straw for hair and moustache, the Hitler doll is paraded around the lanes. It becomes a totem, a fetish, as though the villagers could ward off the approaching Nazis with a voodoo doll. The pair pass a crazed caravan of traitorous villagers with a framed portrait of Hitler shortly afterwards – “Hitler will save us!” – a picture that will return at the end of the film.

The central episode takes place in a village, one of almost 700 razed by the Nazis at that time, as we are informed after the horror has finished at the end of the film. The villagers in the film are not actors, but real villagers. The Nazi regiment that has chanced upon the village toy with them before herding them into a barn and incinerating them. These shots sear themselves into the memory. This is a vision of hell not because of the raging fire and torment alone, but because of the cackling devils and the demonic pandaemonium. German soldiers prance and puke, a jolly Berlin music-hall song plays over Tannoy speakers while the villagers burn to death, a general observes the conflagration with a pet marmoset on his shoulder which he nuzzles affectionately. It may not be a classical vision of hell, but it is no less infernal. This is a film that puts you directly in front of horror and asks, “Can you keep watching? Can you come and see?” There were a couple of moments where I had to turn my head away but Florya does not, and one of the signatures of the film is his inability, or unwillingness, to look away from the nightmare. Come and see. It was his diktat to himself and he stands by it.

The boy Florya was played by a 14-year-old actor, Aleksei Kravchenko, and his performance has been hailed as one of the greatest performances ever given by a child actor. Apart from his winning, boyish smile early in the film at the prospect of glory, Kravchenko has an odd, slightly featureless face. But the way it becomes a mask of fear, an absolute rictus in the face of death, is unforgettable once seen, and reminiscent of the 1928 film version of Joan of Arc, which features only faces. Kravchenko’s hair was said to have turned gray during filming, although in fact this was theatrical hair-dye it took Kravchenko a long time to wash out. The fact that an extraordinary scene in which he lies in a field while bullets scream overhead was filmed using live ammunition probably aided the graying process he will discover later in life. This was a tough film to make, and Kravchenko went from his debut to become a successful actor. I suspect Hollywood starlets are rather more pampered.

The film’s internal dynamic turns from the outward horrors of war to Florya, as he makes a dreadful chain of associations when he sees the old man who had warned them not to dig for the rifle on the beach. The old man is dying, but recognizes Florya as the boy he told not to dig, but he did. They found the rifle, the spy-plane found them, the Germans found the village. Now everyone was dead. And it was Florya’s fault, as far as his reason permits him to unravel the conclusion. He recoils from the dying man in a scene which shows Kravchenko’s ability to strike fear into a cinema audience just using his facial expression, and his is not a large speaking part. The old man warned the boys. They didn’t listen. Now everyone is dead. But Florya’s guilt is misplaced. The Germans would have come anyway, of course, although Florya assumes the guilt for the slaughter, and tries to drown himself in a swamp. The villagers save him, and it seems as the film progresses that they have saved him for a particular reason, a saintly purpose: to go and see.

The final section of the movie is the only one that doesn’t work for me, and it may have been a sop to the Soviet censors. It features Hitler’s life in reverse, and comes to a halt only as Florian shoots Hitler’s portrait with the rifle that started the whole dreadful odyssey he has been through. The film’s original title was the rather lame Kill Hitler. Before this bolted-on finale, retribution is exacted on both the Nazis and the treacherous villagers who help them. As the Germans are gunned down, they have already been doused in gasoline provided by Florya, who seems to believe that a fiery death in which he has participated will help expunge the guilt he still feels.

Come and See is regularly described as an “anti-war film”, a phrase that has always mystified me. I can’t think of many “pro-war” films. Even those movies that the old-school liberal-Left (before the new crazies took over) used to say “glorified war” were generally just realist works which eschewed promoting a message. This is a relentlessly horrifying war film which does not stop, showing as little mercy to the viewer as the Nazi troops show the villagers they drunkenly, laughingly incinerate. The film piles horror on horror as the viewer becomes as inured and numbed to the unending violence as Florya.

Possibly the hardest shot to watch is Glasha emerging from the mist, having been gang-raped and standing with blood running down the inside of her thighs as well as from her bleeding and bruised lips. Florya does not see her at first, hearing instead her feeble attempts to play a set of tin pan-pipes. When he does see her, he doesn’t acknowledge her, turning instead to inspect a motorcycle. He is already dead inside. The central shot uses a split diopter lens, which works much like bifocal spectacles. It allows a figure to be foregrounded to the point they are almost touching the camera, and another several yards in the background, with both in sharp focus. And so we see the appalling ripped mask of Glasha’s face while Florya tinkers with a motorcycle and pays no attention to the dying girl.

As with all movies that test the viewer, be careful with this one. For some reviewers I have seen – and there are many capable film reviewers on YouTube – this is one of those “it changed my life” movies. But Come and See – which did very modestly at the box office – is very much a film that anyone wishing to add to their “seen that” collection should watch. Approach with caution, but come and see.