| Jake Rudegeair |
Come and See plays at the Trylon Cinema on Saturday, June 7th and Sunday, June 8th, as part of Bleak Week. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
“… 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 upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” – The Book of Revelation of St. John
Prepare to have your heart curdled and pressed. Prepare to have your nervous system rattled like a corpse-black skeleton in a crossroads cage. Elem Klimov’s last masterpiece COME AND SEE is cinema in the raw. It’s caustic, an aching descent into the ugliest, most engrossing depiction of war I’ve ever seen on film.
Movies like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, and PLATOON always loomed large in the culture, but I’ll admit to being more drawn to the genre space in my youth. Perhaps we were simply more comfortable with worlds where gore and horror played out in some galaxy far, far away. But if you have even a passing interest in film, the American war genre will find you. When I first planned for this piece, I thought I’d compare this Soviet film gem to some choice examples from the US. But while it does bear some similarity to films like APOCALYPSE NOW (aggressive surreality) THE THIN RED LINE (patient naturalism), or FULL METAL JACKET (casual cruelty), COME AND SEE is one-of-a-kind. A cursed ruby in the bog.
It’s World War II, and the Nazis have expanded into the Soviet Union, spreading Hitler’s nightmare crusade far and wide. Before the Reich is finally defeated and displaced in 1941, they’ll be responsible for more than 2 million killings. No setting could be more dramatic, but the characters somehow match their mythic personas with excruciating specificity. It’s like you recognize them from your lunch line, freshman year. Normal kids, wreathed in destiny. Haunted bad.
Flyora, played by Aleksei Kravchenko, is innocence in an oversized Картуз—an eager, toothy child soldier with not a red speck of understanding for what he’s about to experience. He joins the guerillas, ready to shoot Nazis with the SVT-40 rifle he pulled from the sand. The low, dirty places are where we’ll find him over and over again, clawing and scraping, dreaming, collapsing. Flyora’s youth becomes so ungodly, so obscene in the face of what he’s made to endure, you find yourself mourning him while he still lives, knowing his chance to “love and bear life” has been ripped away from him.
There’s also Flyora’s mother, played by Tatyana Shestakova. It’s a character and performance so wretched and cursed I have to will myself to write about it this very moment, through curled knuckles. In my youth I surely would have related to Flyora’s confident arrogance, his bravery in the face of doom. But now it’s his mother I keep thinking about, wailing and desperate, utterly powerless to stop what’s coming.
Once Flyora finally makes it to the partisan camp, he’s drawn to Glasha, a young field nurse played by Olga Mironova. Hers is as astonishing a performance as I’ve ever seen in anything—whispy-manic, dissociative, clawing at fat mosquitoes in the ripe Belarussian bog-forest. She’s longing, frantic, hunting for something already burned away. Her pain just pulses out of the screen, it’s a crucible.
There is never the faintest whiff of romance here. Perhaps some haggard grasping at lust, even love, in the young way. But any tenderness they share is short-lived, interrupted by deranged shock-joy or a surreal Charleston overtop rusted-out cartridge boxes. The children go insane as the ravages of war pummel them from every direction. Relentless lashings and relashings, nothing to grasp.
And always high above them, a German recon plane circles, drone-trumpeting, an industrial techno-herald of judgement day.
There is too much to say about this movie. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. It hurts, but your eyes stay wide, tears pooling. It’s mesmerizing filmmaking, cinema as the righteous hammer of outrage. But the deepest magic is in the emotion, the heart, the eye, the exhausted knowing, the dolls piled up, the flies, orange bolts in the night, black pools swallowing the island. And when you finally break away, try taking a walk.
You will be grateful.
Edited by Finn Odum