There are things a child should never know about, one of those is the touch of a rifle. Soviet filmmaker and screenwriter Elem Klimov creates an anti-war movie (next to Night and Fog this might be among the few truly "anti-war" films) that transcended its evident anti-fascist, anti-nazism and war messages as Klimov directly encompasses the true character of injustice through the lost of naivety of a kid as that sees himself forced to join the Soviet Union Partisans on their effort to endure the occupation of Nazis in Byelorussia. Come and See has been produced both to depict its frail subjects at hand and to memorialize as a homage the 72 adults and 75 children massacred in Khatyn, on March 22, 1943 (as the final intertitle annunciates: "628 Bylelorussian villages were burned with their inhabitants").
Where does cynicism comes from? Is violence inherent in our nature? Can evil overcome goodness? These are the essential inquiries Klimov answers through a panorama of war and helplessness, when humanity shows the worst of its aspects. While this is answered during the brilliant final montage of the film (more about it later on), these issues are raised up since the beginning through the character of Flyora. From his arc to how Aleksei Kravchenko portrays his character to transmit a completely nuanced transition, Flyora carries the roture of child-like naivety, is innocence against cynicism.
Notice how his countenance, facial expressions, bright, even hair color changes as the film goes on and we (next to Flyora) witness the most brutal events.
Of course this change states how physically damaging, grueling and devastating war is; but besides the risk to get seriously hurt, why is it physically so devastating by its own even if you get no kind of physical damage like losing a limb? This display of reversal panoramas point more towards change, an inner change of our own perceptions, beliefs, characteristics, traits, sensitivity and even our whole personality. Is something that could happen to anyone but we tend to forget that our physical condition is extremely tied and related with our psychological one, a person experiencing trauma besides the devastating emotional conditions could also experience from severe pain to even a type of dysfunction (which will depend over what kind of trauma we are talking about).
Flyora was introduced to a cynical world at an age he was yet too innocent, young and childish to understand. Is this crash between the child he truly was and the adult the world he lived in expected him to be what generates such conflict within Flyora and made him exteriorize such more and more as the film went on. Naivety is only lost when cynicism exists or in other words, goodness disappears when injustice exists. If injustice would never exist this would be a complete alien concept for us, we would live in a perpetual state of innocence simply because we don't know anything outside of it. This is reflected by several of the experiences Flyora lives during war.
Starting with his friendship with Glasha (Olga Mironova). When he brings her to the eerily, rustic and quiet village (where he lived with his mother and small twin sisters); they sit on the dinning room to eat a war stew, however Flyora's family disappeared and he refuses to accept the possibility that they might be death. Unknowable of what actually happened on his house during his departure, he rans away and Glasha follows him. As she was running she glanced back only to see a pile of corpses near the house of Flyora, which confirm the massacre that was already hinted. Klimov uses a reaction shot to emphasize Glasha's expression, she is about the same (or near the same) age of Flyora meaning she is facing the same conflict, here is where her own innocence seems more shattered. However she choses not to spoil Flyora, she screams, but says nothing about the now confirmed death of his family, instead she follows him, she follows the blind hope he had that his mother and sisters would be elsewhere.
Is the innocence of Flyora what made him ran cluelessly, hoping for the impossible. As Glasha also pursuits that false expectations of optimism, she leaved the now gruesome village behind. More than anything I see this as a symbolic statement: to overcome evil we must be naive, we must be like kids. But of course this doesn't mean that only each one of us should individually be naive, as far as this world keeps being the same this would only help for others to take advantage of us. Notice that both keep running forward, it means we all collectively should embrace innocence; the major problems of humanity can come from a single person imposing his cynicism over others and such exists because we have lost a global sense of goodness and innocence.
Moreover, Glasha also makes Flyora struggle between his innocence and cynicism as he seems the concepts she presented to him (like love) completely subverted at the end. During their encounter in the woods, Glasha tells Flyora she wishes to marry and have children and then approaches him physically by giving him a heartfelt and guiltless kiss. This heartfelt and pure expression of love is completely abolished when Flyora sees a catatonic and sodomized Glasha appear to him during the ending as a victim of a gang rape, however this image seems to be a fruit of his imagination. Not that the rape didn't took place; it did, but the victim wasn't Glasha, the victim was another villager yet Flyora pictured this poor young woman as Glasha because she was the one that taught him an innocent view point of "love" (and implicitly sex when she mentioned procreation as an act of love). However, this concept was now completely subverted into something ugly, painful, gruesome and indescribable due to how severe both physically and psychologically rape is.
The only time Flyora shot during the film was in the ending, when he shoot the frame of Hitler as flashbacks of the dictator's life and rise were shown backwards, his contempt for Nazism, all it represents and its leader makes him exploit in an outbreak of violence. However, he stops shooting as the flashback reaches Hitler's earliest state of his life: a baby carried on the arms of his mother. The question "is evil inherent on our nature" keeps resonating as Floyra seems himself incapable to figuratively kill Hitler when he was a baby even if he knew what kind of men he would become. Seeing the upbringing of Hitler, you can understand (in no way justify!) his ideals, he was raised in an environment filled with nationalistic ideas and lost his father and then his mother at a young age becoming a really miserable man that served during World War I. After losing the war he saw the injustices the Treaty of Versailles held against Germany which only helped his nationalists view points gain strength and years later gain Germany. He was one of the masses before he was Chancellor, a crooked man who was influenced since his childhood to grow up his hatred.
This last montage humanizes Hitler as it makes us remember that he like any of us once was a naive kid. It might sound gruesome to state that is important to "humanize" someone like Hitler, however humanize means "to make human" and this is something really important to take into notice because Hitler was no supernatural being, he was a man of blood and flesh like us. When we humanize the enemy we realize is something that could have been prevented the whole time because hatred is not inherent in our nature and we also realize is something any of us could fall into, there are no monsters that is just a colloquialism; however there are humans doing deplorable things and humans turned into crooked and gruesome members of society.
Finally, I would like to encompass the filmmaking qualities of Klimov which on my humble opinion enhance and highlights the powerful portrait of the topics I unraveled (or tried to). What is the most noticeable aspect is the manipulation of sound, it changes constantly throughout the film. For example when Flyora is shot by a bomb which made him partly deaf, we perceive the environment as Flyora hears it. The sound is muted, and a buzzing is persistent through the next scenes. Klimov is asking us to put ourselves in the perspective of his protagonist, he swaps perspectives a lot through manipulation of both sound and framing.
Nothing occupying the frame, or even around it, should be allowed to exploit, delimit, trivialize, or in any way tamper with the truthful depiction of the horrors depicted into the screen. Most directors who recreate crimes against humanity will opt for stylization to soften the images (as in The Boy in the Striped Pijamas, Life Is Beautiful or Schindler's List). Of course, the integrity of screen space is not necessarily violated by stylization, however it does romanticize images of persecution or atrocities that should be otherwise insupportable, an example could be the red-coated girl running through the Krakow ghetto as the Jews are rounded up in the black-and-white Schindler’s List.
Come and See, which is shot in 1.37:1, holds out that threat to moviegoers as Kilmov opposes any conventional type of stylization while also frequently swapping between perspectives to cement Flyora's dominant view point. Yet, what makes Klimov’s film different from other child’s view point of war (like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood), are the confining properties of its frame. Unlike any type of widescreen formats, the squareness ratio can give the impression of concentrating the compositional elements in the frame while accentuating depth of field. This was Klimov and Rodionov's main visual strategy in order to generate that illusion of third-dimensionality which accompanied with their frequent use of close-ups and penetrating eye contact between the actors and the audience hold the environment of the film personally involving and makes the change of perspectives effective to create an immersive thought-provoking commentary.