Come and See

​​"to love... to have children"

I was 9 years old when my father took me to Metro Cinema (Mumbai) to watch JP Dutta's 1997 magnum opus war action drama Border. It was my first movie experience on a big screen and back then Metro Cinema had a 70mm screen with dolby digital sound effects. Watching a war movie on such a big scale was a fascinating experience to my tiny eyes. Lesser I knew that in the coming age this fascinating experience was going to be my favorite movie genre.

After meandering through the end number of war-drama/war-action movies over the course of life, I stumbled upon one of my friend's suggestions. Come and See (1985) This recommendation took me by surprise as I was in a hypothesis of watching all the finest war genre movies yet missing on this masterpiece by Elen Klimov starring Aleksei Kravchenko, based on the 1978 book I Am from the Fiery Village by Ales Adamovich who is also the screenplay writer for this epitome of war genre. Initially the screenplay length was 142 minutes however, they had to fight eight years of censorship from the Soviet authorities, before the film was finally allowed to be produced in its entirety. Sovied authorities only approved 105 minutes of screenplay and rejected 37 crucial minutes by referring it as aesthetics of dirtiness.

The film's plot focuses on the Nazi German occupation of Belorussian villages, and the events witnessed by a young Belarusian partisan teenager named Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko), who against his mother's wishes joins the soviet resistance movement, and thereafter depicts the Nazi monstrosity and human suffering wreaked upon the Eastern European villages. Throughout the film, a Fw189 (tactical reconnaissance and army cooperation aircraft and light bomber used in world war 2 by german army) can be seen flying overhead of Flyora. It seems that Klimov was trying to resemble Fw189 with vultures who prey in anticipation of the death of a sick or injured animal or person. Aleksei Kravchenko once mentioned that while the movie was in production he was 16 years old and fairly healthy as well; but to play a 13 year old he went through the most debilitating fatigue and diet.

Elen Klimov creates the maximum sense of hyper-realism with an underlying surrealism, and often tries to represent the unconscious experience using unusual combinations of images. Since VFX wasn't that cliche back then and also to get some sense of war reality, they used blank ammunition (these bullets are empty inside and do not have any projectile impact) But those blanks can be fired through real guns and creates burst flashes like the real ones. We can see these blanks were used (fired!) effectively in a dead cow scene and was filmed beyond belief. Klimov used an extensive range of camera techniques and one of the most effective was extreme close ups while actors breaking the fourth wall. The entire film catches you off guard and makes you uncomfortable several times. One of the scenes, wherein a young woman who was dragged by german soldiers and thrown in the truck full of men ready to slaughter her like a piece of flesh; in the later scene she was seen covered in blood after having been gang-raped and brutalized, yet whistling and showing her resistance. The film ends with a montage of clips from Hitler's life played in reverse until Hitler is shown as a baby on his mother's lap. And a title informs- 628 Belorussian villages were destroyed, along with all their inhabitants!

- Director Elem Klimov: "I understood that this would be a very brutal film and that it was unlikely that people would be able to watch it"
- Writer Ales Adamovich: "Let them not watch it then, this is something we must leave after us; as evidence of war, and as a plea for peace"

3-Iron

Irons are generally used in a golf club when you are less than a 200 meters away from the greens. The closer you are to the greens the higher iron you will use and 3-Iron is used to hit harder. Now imagine a romantic-drama-crime fiction movie is named 3-Iron! That was my first face-off to the Korean film industry or one of my dearest friends likes to call it K-Series. Lesser we know that Korean film industry is called Hallyuwood which quietly resembles Hollywood but Hallyu stands for Wave in Korean language and once you start watching Korean movies, you get trapped in that thunderous wave. What I like the most about Korean movies is that there is no pretentiousness despite how deep the subject they are handling.

Similarly, 3-Iron deals with an issue of marginality very well. When a certain class/group/tribe of people which does exist in the society yet we treat them as they are invisible to us as being certain class affiliations. A lone rider Tae-suk drives around, breaking into apartments while owners are away, doing household chores, taking selfies and slipping away as the owners arrive. One day he breaks into a huge apartment, assuming it to be an empty one, but completely clueless that he's being watched by a housewife Sun-hwa who is a victim of domestic violence by her aggressive husband Min-gyu. As the story moves ahead, Tae-suk & Sun-hwa flourish a tender, self-conscious and heartfelt relationship and soon Tae-suk bluffs Min-gyu with golf-balls to slip away with Sun-hwa.

From this point, director Kim Ki-duk (who is also the producer and writer of the movie) has captured the voice of voicelessness like never before. As Sun-hwa joins Tae-suk in his house breaking adventure, simultaneously nurturing their romance siltently, and Tae-suk has been shown practicing hitting golf balls occasionally drilling holes in those balls while tying a knot in it. Meanwhile you process with the film, you realize that frequent appearance of golf-accessories is actually a universal sign of opulence and lucre. Golf is a rich man's sport and it reflects the social status and power. Tae-suk occasional practice of hitting golf balls shows how desperate he is to emulate the rich status and Sun-hwa spontaneously tries to stop Tae-suk's emulation of being rich knowing how deceptive it is.

Film paces up in the later part, credit to the series of events put through seamlessly in vivid storyline. In one of the apartments, the house owner who is also a professional boxer catches Tae-suk and almost beats him to the death, while the next house is a very traditional one where Tae-suk and Sun-hwa sit, drink and share a kiss. In the next apartment they found a dead body of an elderly man. All these events were shocking and surprisingly amusing for me at the same time. Being a first korean movie, it was too much to handle and eventually I re-watched it later that night. Each house they enter is mystic and meaningful in its own way. So that elderly dead man's body put Tae-suk and Sun-hwa in deep trouble and strangled them in police investigation. Here Min-gyu re-appears with vengeance of the insult and humiliation he faced. Further series of events locks Tae-suk in jail and Sun-hwa to her husband. In jail, Tae-suk develops skills of stealth and concealment and it was fun to watch how he frustrates the jailers by remaining out of sight.

Tae-suk is released from the prison, so Min-gyu prepares himself in case he returns for Sun-hwa, meanwhile Tae-suk is already in the house with his improved stealth skills nearly invisible to Min-gyu. Then comes the most epic scene of the movie when Sun-hwa appears to say "I love you" to Min-gyu, but kisses Tae-suk over his shoulder. At the end a text appears, "It's hard to tell whether the world we live in is either a reality or a dream" This artwork will haunt you for days and the impact of this unusual love story inside a house filled with domestic violence based above the rich social structure of marginality. This nearly voiceless masterpiece is truly an expressions galore.