Come and See (Idi i Smotri) (1985)

 

Gå og se

The are difficult movies, there are tough to watch movies and then there is “Come and See” (“Idi i Smotri). I suspect the intension was to convince the viewer of the horrors in Belarus during the Second World War and, yes, thank you, I am now very convinced.

Fliora (Aleksei Kravchenko) is a boy, maybe 13 or 14 years old, who is drafted by partisans in 1943, much against his mothers wishes. He is set to do drudgery and left behind with a girl, Glasha (Olga Mironova) when the partisans move on. Glasha and Fliora are bombed and narrowly escape a German paratrooper attack. They go to Fliora’s village, only to find everybody killed in a pile. Fliora knows of a hideout in the swamp, but rather than finding his family, he finds a lot of other starving villagers.

Fliora and three others set out to find food. Two of them are blown up in a minefield and the third is killed by Germans when they try to spirit away a cow. The cow dies too. Fliora narrowly escapes the firefight, but is surprised by the Germans when he tries to requisition horse and cart to bring the dead cow back. The owner of the cart hides him in his home, but that almost gets Fliora caught when SS gathers the entire village in the community hall and sets in on fire.

All this, sounding so trivial in a summary, are presented in all the horrific details, always with an increasingly broken Fliora at the centre. There is a step up in horror through the sequences, so just when you thought it could not get worse, it just does, by about an order of magnitude. For the final destruction of the village, I could only watch this with half an eye, while I tried to distract myself with something else. Otherwise, I would have gotten physically sick. I can only imagine how it would have been to watch this in a cinema (which, reputedly, required an ambulance outside to take sick people away from the cinema).

Kravchenko, as the boy, exposed to all this horror is a study in the effect this have on an impressionable young human being. All innocence is ripped out of him, everything he loves is taken away from him and destroyed and you see it in his face. While it is terrible to look at (suffering children is my personal limit), I cannot help being impressed with this acting effort.

As any movie coming out of the Soviet Union, the movie has a purpose and, in this case, it feeds into the national story of the violation done to Russians (and Byelorussians by extension) during the war. It is very convincing at that, and it cannot even be blamed for exaggeration. In all likelihood, reality was probably even worse. What is interesting is what it choses to show and what is not presented. We see villagers and peasants rounded up and killed and those who escape are fighting it out as partisan, heroically. The few we see who are not peasants, are suspected as or are outright collaborators of the Germans. We see no suffering Jews and no suffering intellectuals. There is a monopolization of the suffering by those that represents the regime.

Today, the suffering of the Russians during the Second World War is still playing a huge role in the Russian mythology and is frequently referred to as an argument for the Ukraine invasion, which is really odd, considering the reversal of the roles (Kravchenko is actually banned from entering Ukraine). A movie like “Come and See” ought to convince anybody that invading other people’s country is a very bad idea and considering the local undesirables as animals that can be destroyed is something to be abhorred. But I guess you can read different meanings into this.

There is no doubt “Come and See” is an impressive and effective movie, and while it probably ought to be watched, it is not an experience I wish on anybody. It will take me some time to recover from the brutality of the scenes in this movie.