Come and See (Klimov, 1985): the curiosities of dissonance

I had always heard that Come and See was an extremely bleak film about the effects of war. But I didn’t realize that it was also an extremely odd film about the effects of war. It makes me uncertain about what it’s doing, about the meaning of its images and narrative—and it does so aggressively, not with a cold, ironic distance from its material, but with kicking and thrashing. It’s full of jolting contrasts and stylistic flourishes. It opens with a child speaking in an unnaturally raspy voice, as if he were imitating the voice of a war-hardened soldier (or of war itself in the abstract). He seems to be playing a role. It’s disconcerting in its degree of exaggeration. And he isn’t just playing a role: he’s facing the screen, directly addressing the audience, playing his role at me. But then all the characters seem to be playing roles; everything is painted in broad strokes and seems somewhat unnatural. That’s especially true of the central character, who’s face seems perpetually and unnaturally contorted. And that face is quite frequently staring at me. The artificiality is odd. It’s purposefully different from the types of artificiality we expect at the movies. And it’s directed at us, confrontationally, as if to make us uneasy, shake us out of our comfortable movie-watching state and make us look anew at the horror on display.

The unnatural tone is contrasted with scenes of very personal suffering and hypersubjective techniques. After the protagonist goes deaf from an explosion, the humming in his ears comes to dominate the soundtrack. But then, for a brief moment, as he struggles through a lake of mud, classical music plays. The classical music is not allowed to give a horrifying beauty to the image, as it would in, say, Schindler’s List. It is cut short, only briefly breaking through the overwhelming hum. The strong contrast between the various moods, styles, and points of view in play are unsettling, making us look at the horror of the scene, the experience of the boy—and even the classical music and its usual role of accentuating the action in movies—with an unusual degree of uncertainty.

Earlier, there’s a conversation that I found very off-putting in its unnatural dialogue. I wondered if it was intentional, if the characters were supposed to be putting on acts. In the next scene, one of the characters dances on a box in the rain. It’s a mesmerizing, beautiful scene, one of the greatest moments of transcendence I’ve seen. But of course, the character is putting on a show. This time, her playacting is obvious. And in the next scene, a series of explosions send chunks of forest into the air and send the characters scrambling for safety. Again, the rapid shifts in tone, mood, and style are jarring, the juxtapositions forcing me to ponder all the scenes, the violence, the artificiality, the frailty of the transcendent moment amidst the hazards of war, but also the frailty of its depiction.

In the film’s penultimate scene, the lead character, his face now permanently frozen in a look of dead-eyed horror, aims his rifle at a portrait of Hitler. With each shot fired, we see newsreel clips of Hitler run back in time. It’s an odd moment in a film full of them. The overt metaphor is almost too simple, the look on the boy’s face too fixed and exaggerated, but the force of the images, their uncanny backward movement, the shots of the gun, and the fact that the boy looks straight at us, somehow doubles back, past the simplicity of the metaphor, into the world of horror and pain that it represents. In the next scene, a group of partisan soldiers, those fighting against the German army, march through the forest. The scene is ethereal and tranquil, a moment of hope juxtaposed against the violent editing of the previous scene. Once again, the film doesn’t allow us to respond to each scene with the obvious, “correct” emotions, with the feelings of sadness, indignation, and cathartic release that these two scenes might normally invoke. Instead, it insists that we respond to both scenes, together, in all their violent contrast, with thoughtful trepidation.

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Tags: dissonance, movies, war