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Rating: In one of the film's concluding sequences, a young and fanatical SS officer responds to the menacing Russian partisans interrogating him by saying that he wanted to kill mainly the children. For, in his view, children are far from innocent; they are the seed of the evil propagated by inferior races, and evil must be eradicated at its root.
A coming-of-age story and a cold documentary, "Come and See" frames the repercussions of the Second World War and conflict in general through plausible microhistory episodes in the territory where it rages and its inhabitants.
Through the eyes of an adolescent, we see unfold on the screen a credible reconstruction of the desolate villages of 1943 Belarus, ravaged by partisan guerrilla operations and the ruthless repression of anti-resistance units, mixed groups formed by members of the SS and the ROA (Russian Liberation Army). Having joined the local resistance, young Florya finds himself isolated in the midst of the German reprisal. An inexperienced and immature boy, armed with a rifle, he finds himself, along with the viewer, catapulted into a hostile and unsettling world, both beautiful and monstrous at the same time, devastated by a war that, in the film's first part, hardly ever manifests directly and is only reflected in nature, splendid and devastated by explosions, and in the terrified eyes of old and bewildered peasants.
There is a strong sense of disorientation and unease, achieved through Klimov's systematic use of disconcerting close-ups and long steadicam sequences. The director often communicates through fascinating and terrifying symbols: the noises and animals of an impenetrable, almost fairytale-like forest, where death appears repeatedly in the form of a swarm of buzzing flies over an abandoned feast table or a row of naked dolls left on the ground. Meanwhile, the sound shakes the viewer: a carefully crafted cacophony, a clashing of environmental noises and musical echoes, reproduces Florya's semi-deafness and his daze as he swims in the mud and ventures into the abyss.
At the beginning of the film, Florya dug in the sand and found a rifle. Continuing his journey of formation and growth, he continues to dig into the impenetrable and invisible horror that, like a mist, shrouds his once simple and peaceful existence, as we follow him, holding his hand, to the climax of his journey, when war and death finally reveal themselves to his eyes in the culminating sequence of the entire work: the reprisal strikes the village where Florya had found refuge, and in a bacchanal of alcohol, rapes, and machine guns, without any explanation, wipes it away while the entire population is crammed and burned alive in a barn.
Klimov touches the deepest sentiments and instincts, twists them, and throws them away without mercy.
The horror of war, chaos, and the lack of comprehensible logic; the brutality that men have demonstrated through the centuries, in any conflict, are made palpable and remain indelible. The images and sounds continue to bounce in the viewer's head, like a nightmare that cannot be forgotten: there is a lack of sequences of spectacular and choreographic violence, dialogues dripping with rhetoric, and the sentimentalism typical of a certain cinema, primarily Hollywood. At the end of the epic, there is no explanation and no comforting conclusion. Accompanied by the mournful notes of Mozart's Lacrimosa, the march towards the forest's interior, towards new horrors, continues. Childhood is over and will never return, Eden is lost, and innocence is tainted, violated.
Florya has lost his home, his family, his innocence. He has gone and seen the Horror. His face is that of an aged adolescent, lined with wrinkles, oblivious of space and time. Desperate, he powerlessly discharges his rifle at a portrait of Adolf Hitler, as footage from documentary films rewinds: they go back to April 1889 and stop at a snapshot depicting the dictator as a child in his mother's arms.
The unsettling final question ties back to the SS officer's logic: could one really kill an innocent creature because it is the future architect of the destruction of one's existence?
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