This intense sequence, full of revealing close-ups and revelatory camera movements, encapsulates many of the strongest qualities of Elem Klimov’s film, in particular its ability to shift tone, visual perspective and viscerally approximate the physical, mental, social and cultural conditions of life in Nazi-occupied Byelorussia in 1943. As he runs pell-mell towards this ‘refuge’, the woman he is journeying with looks back – a strangled scream spills from her mouth as she sees, roughly piled against the side of a building, perhaps a barn, the naked bodies of the teenage boy’s family and many other inhabitants of the village.
Suddenly, and this is a film full of histrionic shifts and turns, the character becomes possessed by the idea that his family is in fact hiding on an island in the middle of a nearby swamp. At each turn we expect for him to discover some horror, to have this brief moment of tranquillity broken by the uncovering of slaughter, a body, something horrible at the bottom of the well. Everything is still and abandoned, flies buzz incessantly on the soundtrack, dolls lay abandoned mid-play on the floor. There is a scene in Come and See in which the lead character (Florya) returns to his family’s village in the expectation of a warm and comforting greeting. Yanchenko, MozartĬast: Alexei Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Lyubomira Lautsyavichyus, Vladas Bagdonas, Yurs Lumiste, Kazimir Rabetsky. Source: AFTRS Prod, Dir: Elem Klimov Scr: Klimov and Ales Adamovich Phot: Alexei Rodionov Mus: O. Come and See (1985 Soviet Union 142 mins)
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