Come and See, as its title suggests, is an invitation. It invites you to sit down at the table of war to see trauma eat away innocence, hunger eat away morals, grief eat away compassion, and glory fade into nothingness. When Flyora is frogmarched by the partisans to join their resistance, we see him grinning cheek-to-cheek. When Kosach’s worn-out gaze rests on him at the end, we see his cheeks convulse, not knowing where to begin or end a smile. We often refer to cinema as a vicarious experience. Here or there, a superlative lavished on a film says that we stop seeing it, we start living it. When I walked back from the screens after Come and See, what I had witnessed breached that threshold. So much of reality bled back into the film drip-by-drip, that the numbness of the bloodiest warfront in human history amputated my thought. Days later as I sit down to write this, I feel that I can now successfully unpack my viewing experience, conscious that my writing will remain a reductionist take of what I’ve watched. To do so, I’m going to move theme by theme, each of which ties into the film’s history, pre-history, and the viewing itself.
On paper, when the film sprouted onto the screens, it was viewed as another addition to the Soviet propaganda machine. Initially titled Kill Hitler, many perceived it to be a literal call from the past and a chest-thumping paean to sacrifice and wartime bravado. Klimov in his later interviews about the film interpolates the invisible dots between those words by saying that it wasn’t a paean, but rather a plea. A plea that urges to kill the Hitler within you. When the reels of the Fuhrer are respooled in the end, the relentless bullets dispatched from Flyora’s gun stop when he envisions Hitler as a child on his mother’s lap. It’s a stark realization and rejoinder to our extenuating and inane proposition that certain men are wholly evil. The lowered gun and streaming tear suggest that all of us teeter on a threshold and circumstances push us one way or the other. Pursuing the retributive path doesn’t erase the pain you’ve experienced, it merely perpetuates it.
Klimov stated that he’d always known he would make a film about the war. Drifting away on the Volga, he saw Stalingrad drown in a sea of flames. Held down and shielded by his mother, he knew his destiny therein. So, with the germinal idea being placed there by his first-hand experience, it wasn’t until he came across Ales Adamovich’s account, I Come From the Fiery Village, did he decide on his material. Ales and Klimov co-wrote the screenplay and the book served as a sacrosanct reference. Klimov always came back to the book on his desk, gripped with the fear that there might be a stray bone of disingenuity in his portrayal. It’s this fastidiousness that allowed history to bleed into the viewing experience. Many times, when you sit down to watch a film, you hope and pray that the director doesn’t take you for a dunce. You don’t want to see him take out his cinematic pointing stick to tell you to feel something. It’s an absurdly insulting way to capture emotion because it’s self-defeating. Even the most uninitiated viewer of cinema has an innate cognizance because cinema’s construct reflects the mind’s eye. If our ability to fabricate emotion is great, even greater is our ability to descry that fabricated emotion; if a wayward bone of emotion juts out, we can perceive it with tremendous acuity. It’s a ridiculously simple truth that dawns on you as you engage more with any art form.
Now that I’ve reiterated this point enough, let me point to why the director’s awareness of this truth elevates a scene. Once Glasha and Flyora reach his village, Klimov follows them back into the latter’s house, a faithful reversal of the camera’s movement mimicking the sequence where he was first marched out of it. With no response to his calls, he urges Glasha to sit down and reaches for the bowl of milk. Oblivious to the flies and the dolls strewn across the floor, he serves her the milk. Spitting it out when she sees the flies, she makes him aware of them. He claims that he knows where they are, and the camera’s composure breaks loose as they run from the village. As they run, Glasha steals a glance back to see the bodies of the entire village dumped behind her. The shot-reverse shot wouldn’t have been longer than two seconds at most. That image only needed a few seconds to sear itself in your mind, not a protracted exposition with tonal shifts accentuated by music. It recalls to me how Bong Joon Ho uses the transience of objects in a frame during a sequence in Memories of a Murder, albeit with movement. A woman is walking back home, and suspect of motion behind her, she turns back. She doesn’t notice, but a tiny figure bobs up before disappearing, just enough for the audience to catch it. A minor blip that doesn’t drastically change the tone but registers the emotion of the scene with force.
Keeping the craft to one side, the answer to why Come and See achieves its horrifying poignancy doesn’t entirely derive from how you construct the film. The objective with which you set out is also pivotal. Out of all the films I’ve watched under the broad umbrella term of “war film”, Apocalypse Now sticks out as the most memorable over the years. Though both these films fall under the same tranche, there’s something implicit in their delivery that distinguishes them. In an interview, Coppola mentioned that he wanted to make a war film mainly as a learning exercise. Tired of the gangster filmmaker tag slapped onto him, he set out to make a war film set in Vietnam. But by the time Brando arrived on sets, he remarked that Coppola had ‘painted himself into a corner’. Coppola himself noted that he allowed the movie to make itself and the direction it pointed to was away from what constitutes the conventional war film. It became an inquest into the human soul and the tone of the movie mirrored this shift as they neared Cambodia. The objective and the execution were both akin to an artist allowing the bristles to guide him.
With Come and See, however, the objective was different. In his interview, Klimov stated with a passing insouciance that awards were not his goal. At some point in the production, he turned to Ales and said that he doubts people would watch such a film. Ales returned saying that it didn’t matter, that this was their duty to record what happened for the annals of film history. The austerity that comes from such a decision severs your liberty to deviate from the mood of the film. This consistency shows throughout – in the characters’ repartee, the colour palette, and the symmetric close-ups. From the opening sequence, there’s an undertow of humour, but it doesn’t provoke your laughter. It’s silly humour, one that those afflicted by war’s horrors use as a crutch to avoid their sanity from crumbling. The colours are grey and moist, with the former becoming more dominant as the film progresses. The close-ups are always held from the same distance, almost cartesian with the placement of the eyes. Klimov even went into such minutiae – he travelled to Moscow to get grey eye lenses for Flyora for the final act. The actor later was informed that the lenses are to be implanted because the colour of one’s eyes reflects their emotional state.
Nonetheless, there’s one brief departure amidst all this. After the camp is bombed by a German air raid, Flyora and Glasha hide out in a makeshift tent. For the next 5 minutes, there’s a stark difference in the colour palette, the only time it takes place in the film. The sun pokes through the canopies, and the trailing rain glistens as they both run around the trees. She’s laughing, he’s laughing. There’s a small rainbow that courses across her face. He’s elated and he shakes the damp tree for it to shower more of rain’s gifts. She tap-dances on a suitcase; he watches with awe. For those five minutes, Klimov shows the children of war relish life without the fear and burden of rifles and bullets. It’s almost asking us – is all this acrimony necessary in the face of such beauty? This emblematic moment isn’t unusual for Russian films – Tarkovsky too placed it within Ivan’s Childhood. Kholin and Masha walk through the woods and in a moment of frantic weakness, he grabs her and kisses her. Freed from his arms, she doesn’t recoil. She walks back slowly, and her face shudders. War props up this façade wherein all of us harden like shells that respond negatively to companionship and love. Its participants are made to believe that to be vulnerable is to be weak. Masha is perplexed, certainly for the brief breach of her volition, but more because she realizes how she and everyone around her have worked so hard to eliminate the tender human frailty that completes us. She has denied herself, like everyone else, the warmth of being vulnerable, even momentarily, in someone else’s arms. When it comes rushing back, she realizes the insanity of it all.
But, above all, there’s a phrase that Klimov flicks at you when you listen to his interviews years after the film. He mentions that he chose Kravchenko, the boy who plays Flyora because he felt the actor anchoring the film should be emotionally defenseless. After all, the war needed to make an impression on Flyora before it passes on to us. As a seasoned actor, there’s always a line of defense that you’ve built up over the years which helps you negate the surprise elements that scenarios fling at you. In an interview, actor Guru Somasundaram, a character artist from the South, makes a point about his formative years at Koothu-P-Pattarai. He was asked to perform physical resistance sessions which later interwove a mental response when he entered films. He gave rejoinders without much thought. Once you’ve built up a wall to stop the film’s emotion percolating through you, there’s an edge that’s lost. Very imperceptible, but in films that lay claim to being hyper-realistic, the differentiating facet is often a sliver of that emotion that springs from beyond the last wall of defense.
With Kravchenko, his future was his collateral considering the subject. Klimov initially dallied with the idea of bringing onboard hypnotists to avoid the young actor suffering emotional damage. His concerns weren’t unfounded given that none of the props were faked. From the careening bullets to the cow that dies in front of him, there was a palpable loss of life. But Klimov remarked that Kravchenko had ‘strong’ nerves. There’s another layer of subtlety that comes with this choice when paired with other casting decisions, notably Kasach. A more seasoned actor, he aligns more closely with his role as a battle-hardened commander and therefore mounts an emotional defense that prolonged participants of war do. It harkens back to the earlier point I made; we, as humans, have a remarkable ability to catch feigned emotion even to an infinitesimal degree. Come and See is potent in its message because we see war’s horrors truly breach people who are defenselessly exposed to it. The extra notch of potency that certain films have due to the naivety of their casts was always an ineluctable phenomenon for me until I came across Klimov and his final tip of the directors’ hat.
The long years that led up to Come and See were hardly pleasant for him. He championed his films restlessly, even when they were lodged on the ministry’s shelves for as long as eight years. When he set out in the late 70s to shoot the film, it was halted because of his suspect record with Agony, his previous outing. Seven years passed, and more tribulations came when they wanted another director to shoot it. Ales’s adamance prevailed and we have what we have today. In between, he’d lost his wife, Larisa Sheptiko, whose directorial excellence I’ve heard of extensively, but none about her husband. I’m equal parts surprised and ashamed that it took me so long to discover this masterpiece (in this case, this word shakes off all its triteness) and give this man his due.
When a film reaches a particular legion for me, I stop pestering it with meaningless comparisons. I urge friends of mine not to ask me to choose between them. They’re all perfected mirrors in their own rights, and they excel because they reflect a facet of life that we’ve neglected to observe. In my ever-evolving definition of what constitutes an artist’s sensibilities, this is how I’ve seen it because no flourish needs to be created, merely observed with a patient gaze that others fail to expend. Come and See has an endless list of frames that reflect Klimov’s sensibilities, but I chose to put Glasha dancing in the rain as a thumbnail because it’s a fitting crown to the humanist in him; a moment where artillery and animosity stop to watch the children of earth do what they’re meant to do.
