Come and See
So ugly. So human. So terribly, wickedly honest and unapologetic. Come and See denies its audience of the comforts afforded by other films within the genre, some more traditional, others more nationalistic. This is not a victory. Not a feel-good tale of triumph and hard-won success. Flyora, a fourteen-year-old boy, doesn’t fight a war. He witnesses one. At the film’s beginning, he is eager, and there is a child-like, impressionable excitement to his desire to join the partisans, to defend his family and his people, only to witness humanity pervert and dismantle itself around him during the film’s 142-minute runtime. By its end, the rosy, round-faced child we knew has seemingly aged decades.
Kilmov renders war, not as a spectacle, as a violation of the senses. The soundscape, alone, is a deep, inescapable circle of hell — a cacophony of gunfire, laughter, crying and wailing, warped music, ringing ears — until human and animal suffering becomes indistinguishable. Images and sequences repeat to return corrupted. Proudly, Flyora poses for a photograph with the partisans, then is later posed like a trophy by the Nazis, although he is a prop, nothing more than a tool or object in both. Beside a dying woman, he reaches for gauze, and for one hopeful, fleeting moment, I thought that he might help her, tend to her wounds, despite her affiliation with his enemies. Instead, he uses it to mend his rifle.
The fiction itself collapses. It’s archival, the images of near-dead, emancipated bodies. It’s real. It’s nightmarish. Somehow, after showcasing the worst, the most cruel and the most disgusting, of humanity, Kilmov refuses to abandon it. There is no forgiveness, no absolution and certainly no diminishing of Hitler’s victims and the hatred and worldwide violence he unleashed, but as Flyora refuses to shoot the image of an infant in his mother’s arms, regardless of who he is and what he will become, the acknowledgment is a difficult one: evil does not belong to, is not born of, demons or monsters. Humans inflicted this evil, wickedness upon other humans.
Then, Mozart’s Lacrimosa plays. Fuck me. What a brutal, vulnerable act of filmmaking. It’s extraordinary, the moral humility and courage required to stare so deeply, so unflinchingly at humanity’s capacity for evil and genocide and destruction and still refuse to dehumanize us in return.