In most cases, I would say that the closest a film can come to achieving perfection is for its story to phase through the screen and seep into you, hooking its claws into your chest until you and the protagonist are molded into one— his pain is your pain, and his joy is your joy. This is not what Elem Klimov does.
In Come and See, the viewer is no longer an impartial voyeur, nor does he play the role of the exhibitionist. Rather, the viewer is a ghost, trapped between the walls of the Academy ratio, disoriented and incongruous to the alien Belarusian countryside. You are simultaneously haunting and haunted, unable to pry your eyes away for fear of losing what’s left of your sentience to this nightmare-turned-insatiable-beast.
Klimov abandons the moral subjectivity of self-righteous pacifists just as one would throw away a boot which no longer fit— Come and See might have been filmed in color, but ethically, it is painted solely in shades of black and white. In Klimov’s 1943 Belarus, Adolf Hitler is shrouded in an impenetrable darkness.
Come and See is as vivid of a fever dream as 82 minutes of 35mm film could possibly be. It is void of the shiny Hollywood polish so often lathered onto war movies and instead imbued with gore wrought from the life-altering pain of skin peeled off of bone, sound design forged from the thudthudthud of a mother’s heart as she waits for Nazis to tear the hair out of her daughters’ skulls, and performances so raw they force you to contemplate the authenticity of the soul residing in your own bones.
TL;DR: I will never put myself through meth withdrawals nor walk alone as a woman at night because this movie is enough trauma to last a lifetime.
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