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Come and See (Иди и смотри transliterated "Idi i smotri") is a 1985 Soviet/Belarusian film, directed by Elem Klimov and starring Alexei Kravchenko and Olga Mironova in the leading roles. The film is set in 1944 in various villages in Belarus during the Nazi occupation.

This film has not been rated by the MPAA. As it has violence, blood and suggestions of sex, it has been rated K-16 in Finland (and similar ratings in Iceland, Argentina and Germany), and acceptable for 15-year-olds and older in England and Sweden. There would be no nudity if it weren't for a brief view of a woman's breasts, and for this alone the MPAA would have probably rated this movie R. Just for the violence it might have gotten a PG-13.

Plot summary

Two young boys dig around a sand field looking for rifles.

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One of the boys, Florya, finds a rifle, and the next day partisan fighters show up at his house, taking Florya with them. The militia prepares to confront the Nazis, but at the last minute the commander decides Florya will stay behind in the partisans' camp, which rather disappoints the boy. He meets Glasha, a girl who is also staying behind. Suddenly, German airplanes show up and bombard the nearly abandoned camp.

Florya loses his hearing and returns to his village, certain that his family hid on an out-of-the-way island. There, he meets many villagers who fled the Nazis - it takes a while before he realizes that his family did not survive. He and three resistance fighters leave to find food for the starving villagers who are hiding on the island, but they find that the Germans are advancing far faster than they had anticipated and that storehouses of food are nowhere to be found. One by one they die from enemy fire until Florya is once again left by himself. They manage to steal a cow from a local farmer, but the cow dies in a battlefield during the night before Florya can walk it back to the hungry villagers.

Morning finds Florya in a farm field, near a village that is close to being occupied by the Nazis. An old man takes Florya and gives him the identity of one of his grandchildren, telling him to hide his rifle in a haystack so that the Germans do not suspect him. The Germans move into the village and herd all of the people into the wooden church until it is filled wall-to-wall with families. German propaganda vans drive throughout the village while the villagers are being rounded up, their louspeakers making announcements such as "Germany is a civilized country". Once nearly all of the villagers are inside, the church is set ablaze. Florya escapes this fate - the only people whom the Nazis do not kill in the village are the childless and the very old.

Florya recovers his rifle and meets up again with the resistance fighters, who have somehow managed to capture the Nazis. The Nazi leaders are given a chance to justify their actions, and they do this in different ways. In the end, Florya douses the Nazis with gasoline and the other resistance fighters shoot at them. A man holding a torch decides not to use it and extinguishes it in the water.

As the resistance fighters begin to march after the retreating German army, Florya notices a portrait of Adolf Hitler on the bank of a river. What follows is perhaps the most famous scene from the film:

Florya starts shooting at the portrait. Each shot, separated by about 15 seconds, is interleaved with a montage that goes backwards through time: We see corpses at a concentration camp, Hitler congratulating a young German boy, some Nazi party congresses of the 30s, stills from Hitler's service in World War I, stills of Hitler in school, and ending with a picture of Hitler as a baby on his mother's lap. After each of those scenes Florya shoots at the picture again, symbolically undoing those images, but Florya does not make the final shot which would have symbolically destroyed Hitler as an innocent baby.

The final scene in the film is of Florya catching up to the partisan column, and after following him, the camera lifts up to the sky. There is no closure - even after all of the horrible things that the protagonist has witnessed, he is not given any reprieve. It is implied that the war will go on forever.

Production

A lot of the footage was shot with Steadicam.

The prosimian that is seen as the pet of a German SS Officer is called the Red Slender Loris.

Music

The original soundtrack is rhythmically amorphous music composed by Oleg Yanchenko. At a few key points in the film existing music is used, sometimes mixed in with Yanchenko's music (such as Johann Strauss Jr.'s Blue Danube). At the end, during the montage, music by Richard Wagner is used, most notably the Ride from Die Walküre. The conclusion of the film uses the Lachrymosa from Mozart's Requiem.

Awards

• 1985—FIPRESCI prize at the Moscow International Film Festival.
• 1985—Golden Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival

Criticism

Walter Goodman, writing for the New York Times, dismissed the ending as "a does of instant inspirationalism," but concedes to Klimov's "unquestionable talent."

Some viewers say that if the film was intended to be Soviet propaganda, a charge that it has been accused of by some Western reviewers, Florya would have made the final shot after the baby picture of Hitler is shown. The scene ends on a distinctly unsettling note, suggesting that all of us have the capacity to do what Hitler did.

References

• Goodman, Walter. “Film: ‘Come and See’”. The New York Times 6 Feb. 1987.

• 1985 films
• Russian-language films
• World War II films