Tuesday, July 27, 2021

Idi i smotri

Quite some time back, TCM ran the movie Come and See in the TCM Imports slot. Since TCM seems to get all the Imports that it shows from Criterion, it's unsurprising that this one has gotten a DVD and Blu-ray release from Criterion. I finally got around to watching it to do a review on it here.

Flyora (Alexei Kravchenko) is a young boy living in Byelorussia (then part of the Soviet Union and now Belarus) in 1943. If you know your geography and history, you'll know that's smack dab in the middle of World War II and exactly the area through which the Germans had to march to try to get to Moscow; consequently, if the Soviets were going to turn the tide of the war, they'd be marching back through Byelorussia on the way to Germany.

Flyora lives in a small rural village with his mother and younger twin sisters, his father either being dead of in the military like most adult men. Flyora does some digging outside their house, finding a military rifle. This leads members of the Soviet resistance, led in the area by Kosach (Liubomiras Laucevicius) to stop by the house and inform the famly that the Nazis are in the area and that Flyora can join the resistance. He does, but he's really too young to be fighting, so he's ordered to give his boots to a man of fighting age while Flyora is left behind in the woods some ways from his family's house.

Out in the woods, he meets Glasha (Olga Mironova), and the two become allies as they're all alone in the woods. But they're not going to be alone for long as the Nazis start bombing the forest, deafening Flyora and forcing the two of them to flee and try to find shelter anywhere. It's just the first of the horrors that's going to befall poor Flyora. Eventually, he and Glasha make it back to his family's village, but the Nazis have already been through and killed everybody, not that Flyora wants to accept this. (We see all the bodies left in a heap along one of the walls of Flyora's house.)

Flyora makes it to another village, but this too is a village where the Nazis are approaching and are going to overtake, trying to kill as many of the villagers as possible by locking them in what was either an old school or church that's had everything inside removed, and setting the building on fire. (A title card near the end of the movie informs us that something just over 600 villages in Byelorussia were burned to ground by the Germans.) Somehow, Flyora not only climbs out the window, but isn't killed for it by the Nazis, which to me was the one major plot hole in the movie. But then, I suppose one could say that it was an even bigger horror for Flyora to have to survive and see all these horrors than to have his life mercifully taken from him.

Although I called Flyora's escape a plot hole, in some ways that might not be fair as Come and See is by design relatively light on plot. It's not about the standard sorts of plots that you'd get in the old Hollywood or British rah-rah war pictures, but instead a snapshot in time of one adolescent's experiences in the war. That might not be to everybody's taste, and what even more so might not be to some people's tastes is how harrowing the movie is, being unrelentingly disturbing but incredibly well made, if you're willing to sit through 140 minutes of brutality.

Some of the technicals surprised me. There's no letterboxing, but according to IMDb, the movie actually was filmed in the 1.37:1 Academy ratio. I wonder as well if that's the reason why some of the scenes look grainy, or if Soviet film stock wasn't as good as western stock. I haven't really noticed that in other East bloc movies, however.

If you're ready to sit through a brutal movie, then I can absolutely recommend Come and See.

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