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"