“…and I saw one of the four living creatures saying, as with the voice of thunder, Come and See.”
Very few Americans could pick out Belarus on a map. The Western mind even today, so many years after the fall of the Soviet Union, suffers difficulty in distinguishing it from its Giant Eastern neighbor. Their unique culture, history and language is lost to most.
In an era when most of us don’t even know our own history, it is largely forgotten that Belarus bore the brunt of Nazi depredations in the east. It is a well educated person indeed that knows that what they suffered at the hands of the SS was comparable to the Holocaust. Come And See tells the story of the attempted genocide of the Belarusian people, on a small scale, as seen through the eyes of the innocent.
We see brave, bright faced young Fiyora digging in the mud, though the graves of soldiers. He needs a rifle. The partisans will only take him if he can provide his own rifle. So as a highly symbolic Nazi bomber flies over his head, he digs, and finds his prize. There is a sad goodbye in which he sees his mother for what he does not know will be the last time.
Fiyora becomes a partisan, but in what is given as a mercy, they will not take him on campaign. He is made to stay behind with the camp followers. His shame is somewhat mitigated by meeting a new friend in pretty young Glasha, and they are becoming acquainted when the bomber drops clusters nearly upon them, and paratroopers invade the camp. Fiyora, now partially deaf (there are some fine scenes of verisimilitude in which we hear something like what he is hearing) takes Glasha back to his village. Fiyora cannot find his mother and twin sisters, and concludes that they must have retreated to the bogs.
As he runs towards them, Glasha looks behind, and sees the bodies of the villagers piled up behind a house.
He finds the rest of the villagers, including his badly burned uncle, who tells him of his families death. By this time, Fiyora’s intelligent, smiling, handsome face has already been distorted into a mask of pain, pale, with swollen, cracked lips and a vacant stare. But he hasn’t given up yet. He resolves to find food for the starving children, and goes out on a raiding party along with three others, and a hideous effigy made for a Nazi coat, a skeleton, clay, and Fiyora’s own hair. The raiding party is killed, save Fiyora, and his rifle is broken. Aware of nearby Nazi presence, he buries the rifle and his partisan coat. He is taken into a nearby village by a local peasant who will hide him as a relative.
An einsatzgruppen unit appears.
Until this point, Come And See is an interesting, but not overwhelming film. But the depredations of the Germans and their native allies, as they lock the villagers, children and all in a barn, and set it on fire, stopping to sexually assault, shoot or torture those few who dare to get out, will get under your skin like no film before. Schindler’s List, Cross of Iron, Stalingrad, Saving Private Ryan simply do not hit the same nerve that these scenes hit. The movie manages an odd, indescribable visual poetry throughout while showing in these scenes a heartbreaking cruelty that looks only too real.
Our hero survives a moment in which it looked as if the Germans were going to shoot him in the head; they were only posing or a picture. But he now looks like a ghost, his face physically deformed and betraying psychological scars. There is an almost unbearable moment when he stands next to a similarly distorted rape victim, their faces mirror images of suffering.
There are several real differences between what is presented in the previously mentioned films and what we are made to come and see. One is the self congratulatory humor that spreads though the German cap like an infection, epitomized by the picture, taken while placing a gun to Fiyora’s head. It is enunciated later when the partisan’s catch a few of the German command - they simply do not think of the Belarusians as worthy of life. There torture and death is a reason to celebrate.
And Come And See is a war story that we rarely see filmed - it tells the story of those who never get to fight back - who neither sacrifice for their liberation nor make any heroic last stand. Come And See tells the story of those who suffer and die, who watch their children murdered, their wives raped, their homes burned, and their families with them. Come And See does not attempt to be sweeping and cinematic - it narrowly focuses on someone that we come to know as a real person, and shows us as his world is destroyed piece by piece along with his sanity. There are no great battles, only a massacre; no hero’s, only victims.
But if he is not literally a hero, then Fiyora is a still a hero in his now twisted heart- there was some part of him that they could not touch. And so, he digs up his coat and his rifle, repairs the broken part of it, and marches off with the partisans. In one final, perhaps too composed and self-indulgent moment, he finds a picture of Hitler. There is a montage of him shooting it intercut with images of the war, going back to WWI, Hitler’s service, and finally, Hitler as an innocent child. Fiyora does not shoot the child image.
This is not the only moment of artifice in the film. Some of the early acting is a bit cartoonish, and dialog strange. It can probably be attributed to cultural differences. I would welcome any thoughts on what the symbolism of the Nazi effigy created by the villagers might mean. But what Come And See delivers in its second half is simply the most disturbing images of WWII ever put on film, save those of documentary.
Recommendation- This one gets under your skin. Watch at your own risk.
Director: Elem Klimov
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