Prior to watching ‘Come and See’ I recalled a quote I'd seen somewhere which said that in its portrayal of the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Second World War it ‘makes ‘Schindler’s List’ look like a Disney film’.
With this in mind I approached my viewing with an acute sense of anxious anticipation and a fair amount of scepticism as to the claim. It just so happens that Elim Klimov’s film may be the most grueling I’ve ever experienced, whilst also being certainly one of, if not the finest, war film ever made.
The narrative centres on the atrocities committed in the Byelorussian region, draped over the loose coming-of-age journey of the young protagonist Flyora. The central theme running through the film, acting as its spinal column, is that of evil. Not the evil of psychopaths or tyrants but the evil of ordinary men.
As the film begins, this sense of ‘ordinary evil’ – or, to coin Hannah Arendt’s oft-used term, ‘the banality of evil’ – begins to leak out gradually with the arrival of two soldiers, one stern the other jovial, to take Flyora away from his hysterical mother and younger sisters. The dread, tension and general air of foreboding proliferates right from the off.
These men turn out to be members of the Russian militia fighting the resistance against the invading Nazis, and yet it is this initial juxtaposing ambiguity that provides the canvas for what follows. There is the further dismay and rejection Flyora feels upon being told to stay behind at the camp whilst the others go off to fight, as well as being forced to surrender his sturdy boots for an elder's ragged and worn pair. This is the juvenile sense of 'evil injustice' that most children rage against at some point, that of being rejected through insufficient maturity or of having proud possessions wrenched away from them.
As it is, the Nazis themselves don't materialise until almost 90 minutes through the film; being symbolised instead by a recurring motif of a bomber flying overhead - the spectre of death always close at hand.
This point-of-fact is aligned to the film's ideological standpoint. It is removed from taking either a political or a moral position on the events being played out; it has a very Russian sense of passive detachment that amplifies the film's almost unbearable impact in a way that an American, and perhaps even British, film would never have been able to achieve to the same devastating extent.
In saying this, I refute the allegations leveled against the film of being overtly propagandist, despite it being sanctioned and funded by the Soviet Union, in that to my way of thinking it takes no sides, there is no moral redemption, there are no heroes on display. Instead you are simply exposed to the mind-bending horror that, like a surrealist nightmare, reveals itself to the viewer in incremental stages.
It is this suggested, rather than presented, horror that imbues the film with its nightmarish quiddity, and by so doing has often been compared stylistically to Kubrick's 'The Shining'.
There is little-to-no on-screen violence, it is all enacted off-screen, with the aftermath of the barbarity given full-frontal exposure. For instance, the charred body of a man burned alive, the bloody, beaten and gang-raped girl staggering towards the camera; these are provided to the viewer as testament to the most appalling acts of evil that are crafted and handled so brilliantly by Klimov that the cumulative effect is nothing less than the sheer dehumanising of everyone involved - of the victims, of the perpetrators and of we the audience.
In this sense, it is reminiscent of Michael Hanake's subversive yet lamentable 'Funny Games', a film in which despicable acts are played out in order to provoke the audience - as voyeurs on the wider terrain of violence - into a reaction, to challenge them to keep on watching. Whilst admittedly a worthy attempt at pushing the boundaries of morality and art, I found 'Funny Games' to be predominantly on the wrong side of flippant and, in comparison to 'Come and See', overwhelmingly glib and smug in its tone.
It is this thematic trope of forcing the viewer to endure and wallow in the evil of events that takes on a surrealistic corporeality when Flyora and Glasha (a girl with whom he forms a short-lived bond) wade through a feculent bog, caked up to the neck in the viscous mud, as they struggle at a maddeningly slow pace through a wonderfully-held tracking shot.
The centrepiece of the film is naturally the most harrowing. Rounded up by the marauding Nazis, a crowd of villagers are herded into a barn which is then set alight. We see nothing of the victims aside from a few muffled screams, instead the camera pans across the ranks of Nazis standing to observe the spectacle before breaking into applause as though they were watching an opera.
It is a scene of tremendous emotional weight, primarily due to the detached and unaffected tone in which it is captured. The Nazi soldiers are not inhuman monsters, they are not cartoon villians (as they are portrayed in Quentin Tarantino's rather lightweight 'Inglorious Basterds' for instance), they are simply ordinary men driven to commit acts of pure baseness by virtue of their human nature, contaminated by twisted ideology and the intoxicating power of crowd psychology.
Neither does Klimov make any attempt to portray them as complex characters, in the same way as Spielberg did with Ralph Fiennes' character in 'Schindler's List', they are as plain and as abstract as the people they brutalise.
It is this overriding idea that races to the fore in the final sequence (strikingly reminscient to the revelatory bursting into colour at the end of Tarkovsky's 'Andrei Rublev'), for my money one of the most breath-taking pieces of cinematic art ever achieved.
Spotting a discarded portrait of Adolf Hitler, Flyora finally has an ebullition of vengeful rage, repeatedly firing his rifle whilst archive footage rewinds events; his bitter shots representing an attempt at rolling back history, through all the rallies and demonstrations, speeches and parades, until we arrive at a family portrait of the Fuhrer as a cerubic and innocent child. It is this moment that explodes all the hollow notions of evil that have been displayed and that we been challenged to 'come and see'.
We, like the protagonist, realise the sheer futility in creating monsters or icons of evil out of men like Hitler because to do so is far too reductionist and simple. Events such as those documented in the film are too complex to be rationalised or filtered into a blind hatred for one man. Such a mentality is useless and prohibits any real hope of ever understanding, or attempting to understand, the inexplicable evil that ordinary men enact upon other ordinary men.
Fantastic review Michael.
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