{"id":14322,"date":"2021-08-02T20:00:34","date_gmt":"2021-08-03T00:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=14322"},"modified":"2021-08-01T16:37:31","modified_gmt":"2021-08-01T20:37:31","slug":"come-and-see-1985-elem-klimov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/14322","title":{"rendered":"Come and See (1985, Elem Klimov)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Movie opens with “uncle” yelling at unseen hole diggers, then a boy with a (comically? horribly? we don’t know yet) hoarse voice comes out and curses into the camera. For maybe a decade I’ve been half-meaning to watch this movie because it’s supposed to be great, then avoiding it since it’s a horrors-of-war through eyes-of-a-child story. Turns out it’s not the depressing slog I imagined, but has big Emir Kusturica energy, hardly ever stops being amazing even when it starts being completely brutal. Let’s keep avoiding Son of Saul<\/em> for the time being, though.<\/p>\n

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Our boy Fliora finds a gun, so is allowed to leave his family and join the Belorussian soldiers in WWII – then he’s ordered to swap his good boots for an older soldier’s, and gets left behind. No fighting yet, already a good amount of crying. He soon teams up with older Glasha and they dodge bombings and forge minefields and swamps, as Fliora and Glasha become ever-more traumatized by their experiences. We get the post-bombing tinnitus sound – I didn’t think they were doing that in the 1980’s. The explosions in this movie look unlike normal war-movie explosions – they look dangerous! It’s an angry movie, also bringing to mind Hard To Be a God<\/a><\/em>, and gets extremely brutal as it goes on.<\/p>\n

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Bird Content: Fliora stomps on a nest full of eggs (boo), but later a beautiful stork looks in on our heroes (yay).<\/p>\n

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Mark Le Fanu for Criterion<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The film’s working title, before it turned into the biblical exhortation Come and See<\/em>, was Kill Hitler<\/em>. Klimov was always careful to explain in interviews that this was not to be taken in its literal meaning but rather as referring to a sort of universal moral imperative: \u201cKill the Hitler that lurks potentially in all of us!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Klimov was married to Larisa Shepitko, whose films I’d very much like to see. Cinematographer Aleksey Rodionov would later work with Sally Potter. Lead kid Aleksey Kravchenko kept acting, was recently in The Painted Bird<\/em>. Filmed in Belarus, which was in the news for arresting dissidents the morning after I watched this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Movie opens with “uncle” yelling at unseen hole diggers, then a boy with a (comically? horribly? we don’t know yet) hoarse voice comes out and curses into the camera. For maybe a decade I’ve been half-meaning to watch this movie because it’s supposed to be great, then avoiding it since it’s a horrors-of-war through eyes-of-a-child […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[357,2889,13,37,773],"class_list":["post-14322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1980s","tag-belarus","tag-criterion","tag-war","tag-wwi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14322"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14357,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14322\/revisions\/14357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}