|
I saw this last summer and following is my contemporaneously written review:
Once, a million years ago, when I was just a kid, I went with a group of friends to see a war movie. For every reason imaginable, including the fact that the movie was showing at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, all of us were completely stunned by the movie and didn’t say a word for the entire hour drive home. The movie was Apocalypse Now.
I haven’t seen very many films that had the same impact on me that Apocalypse Now did as a first run film, but I saw one today. In a crappy art house theatre with a small screen (not as small as some, but this was no Cinerama Dome), uncomfortable seats, poor sound quality and also poor print quality despite the fact that this is a new print, I sat through the fastest 142 minute film I have ever experienced. I barely moved, I never checked my watch. And I just pulled out the theatre’s calendar to check some of the facts on the movie and started crying when I saw the photo they’re using to advertise it.
Come and See is about Flor, a Byelorussian teenager (unforgettably played by Aleksei Kravshenko) conscripted by the partisans as the Germans invade. He is eager -- gleeful in fact -- to be off to war, the envy of his younger friends, the hero of his little sisters. We watch this young man age and wither through a series of events in Nazi-occupied Byelorussia that culminates with the massacre of a village in which he has taken shelter. The film is more episodic than narrative, and each incident is far beyond the experience or imagination of most of us. Yet I understand that director Elem Klimov drew on childhood memories to make the film.
Come and See is horrifying and awful; it is stunningly beautiful; watching it is a brutal, punishing experience and it’s one that I wouldn’t trade. It is a Hieronymous Bosch painting with sound and movement, its images are ghostly and yet visceral. You thought Saving Private Ryan or Hamburger Hill was brutal? See this one. I am no fan of gratuitous violence, not at all, but I do appreciate an anti war film that makes its point. I wish I could send everyone who has seen or will see Pearl Harbor to see Come and See instead. War isn’t a love story. Really.
See this film. You won’t “enjoy” it, but you’ll never forget it.
Reactions in San Francisco:
"Perhaps the single most brutal and traumatic cinematic depiction of war ever filmed. (Director Elem) Klimov is not content to merely lay out atrocities for us to gaze upon. His impassioned poetic direction, bolstered by an atonal soundtrack and imaginative sound design, results in a multilayered experience that engages the sense even as it sears the mind." -- Patrick Macias, S.F.Bay Guardian
"Raw and punishing, veering between visual poetry and nightmare images of war and sadism, COME AND SEE is one of the great anti-war films". -- Edward Guthmann, S.F. Chronicle
"In a perfect world, "Come and See," opening today at the Roxie for a week's run, would put an end to all World War II movies" -- Jeff Anderson, S.F.Examiner
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Sooner You Open Your Mind, the More Time You Have to Enjoy Sex.
~ ~ ~
All meetings end in separation
All acquisition ends in dispersion
All life ends in death
- The Buddha
|\_/|
='_'=
Every hundred years, all new people
|
Printer-friendly copy 
Email this topic to a friend
Pass The Popcorn 
