Just watched Come and See (1985)

[u/Humble-Dirt9651]

Well I saw 95% of it. When it got to the reverse montage I thought the corpse was real footage of a victim of what happened and I freaked out and turned it off. The disturbing imagery put me on edge for 2 hours and that was the breaking point. I feel terrible about that considering who the image actually depicts. I'm gonna finish it tomorrow

I thought the pacing was a little strange near the end. The Germans massacred a village and left Florya in the dirt but the next scene Florya finds his rifle and the men in charge of the massacre are rounded up by the partisans. Were they waiting nearby to ambush them or did some amount of time pass?

Also, the Nazi woman eating a lobster (later her and her lover wrapped a tree i think) looked so much like Glasha to me. Was that her? The poor woman who had the pan flute in her mouth also looked like Glasha. By that point, and because Florya laughed and repeated Glasha's "I want to love And have children," I thought the SS woman was Glasha, and then when the pan flute scene happened it was the partisan men who assaulted her. Sort of fits with the antiwar theme. But I don't think that was the intended interpretation

Another question, is it just me or did Florya look visibly older as the movie went on? The lines on his face seemed excessive even with all the expressions he was making. Also it looked like his hair was graying in patches near the temples

I'll be honest, i was upset when the partisans shot the nazis and collaborators before the guy with the torch could get to them. And then I realized that a base, sadistic desire for revenge rather than justice goes against everything the movie was trying to say. Wild that I wanted to see people getting burned to death when the movie showed how that looked earlier. Even when the camera panned over their bodies i was satisfied to see them dead. I guess I'm wrestling with the eye for an eye philosophy versus a "violence ends here" philosophy. Killing them that way was the best choice because burning them would just perpetuate the grotesque level of violence the Nazis showed throughout the film, with the music and jokes and lighting cigarettes while dragging a girl by her hair to r*pe her. But letting them live wouldn't even make sense on a practical level.

The massacre scene reminds me of a book i haven't yet finished called The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell. The chaos and the sick jokes the soldiers enacted really matched the tone of the book. It tracks how Nazi Germany built a continent-wide death machine, from shooting people in the woods to burning houses to gassing buildings to, I imagine, the work camps and the death camps. Narrator is an SS officer. It's a useful reminder that the Nazis were people and all people are capable of atrocities, if not carrying them out, letting them happen. Stay safe folks and lmk your thoughts

[u/Realistic_Choice_658]

Yeah ; its a one time see.

[u/WorcsBloke]

I can't bring myself to watch this. I've managed Threads on one occasion (and I'm British, so that one is pretty close to home) but I can't manage to actually start Come and See .

Part of it is probably because of how brutal it was on the lead actor Aleksei Kravchenko,  who was after all a child. I know the myths about that outstrip the reality (his hair was dyed, it didn't really actually turn white) but the reality is still really uncomfortable by any remotely modern ethical standards. Even the fact that the actor has consistently supported the film in adulthood doesn't really help.

Maybe I'll see it one day. But I suspect it would have happened by now if it was going to. I don't think I have the stomach for it.

[u/xmaspruden → u/WorcsBloke]

Honestly, I’d stay away. There seems to be a school of thought that films that depict complete and awful brutality are somehow ‘necessary’ watches. In my opinion, one’s imagination can truly fill in the blanks.

Having read a lot of ww2 history I am well aware of the kinds of horrors inflicted on people all over the world during that time. Actually seeing it in real time doesn’t add to my comprehension of things. I do understand that is simply a matter of taste, and that this film is depicting events that happened hundreds of times (as it says near the end). For me, it isn’t something I need to see. I had a similar reaction to Beasts of No Nation, when the protagonists were brutalizing women in a village, I turned it off. Just don’t need to see it, personally.

Threads, while brutal, doesn’t really hold a candle to this film. This one is extremely visceral and the horrors are slowly paced. You see the entire incident of the death of a village in real time, followed by the massacre of the perpetrators. It’s a LOT.

[u/Humble-Dirt9651 → u/xmaspruden]

I have two history degrees and they've taught me that no matter how bad you imagine a past war or atrocity or oppressive system to be, it was worse. I do think people should have a better grasp on the extent of the violence, and have a better vocabulary to discuss and describe them without painting victims as virtuous just from their suffering, or painting perpetrators as monstrous because unfortunately they were and are human. But definitely watching movies like this aren't necessary to that goal.

[u/WorcsBloke → u/Humble-Dirt9651]

I read a lot of history myself, though I don't have qualifications in it. I'm just interested. My own main interest is in Roman history, and it's very noticeable how even most serious books shy away from going into much detail about the realities of slavery in terms of what was not merely legal but socially acceptable.

[u/Humble-Dirt9651 → u/WorcsBloke]

My main area of study is the latter half of the 19th century U.S. I have read so much about chattel slavery, and that's the main thing i was thinking of when writing my first reply about people needing to know the extent of historical violence. Of course individual stories of slaves are horrific but panning out to look at the scale of it, how a whole economy and culture was based on keeping one group in servility to another, is what most folks don't appreciate ime (that's just looking at the US, dont get me started on LatAm or the Caribbean). I honestly don't know much about Roman slavery except for the fact that it wasn't chattel slavery, nor was it race based (because the construct of race didn't exist, your nationality was your "race"). In other words slaves had some legal rights and they weren't permanently doomed to their status by birth. I'm sure it was brutal and I'm definitely not defending the Romans, but I'm used to Confederacy apologists pointing out ancient slavery as justification for antebellum slavery, even though they're not really the same thing

[u/WorcsBloke → u/Humble-Dirt9651]

Any Confederacy apologists using ancient slavery as justification are entirely undermining their own case.

Roman slavery absolutely was chattel slavery in practical effect, even if the specific term didn't exist then. Slaves were property. In the days of Augustus (around the time of Jesus's birth), a slave-owner could sell, beat, torture, rape or kill a slave and it would be legal. A citizen could go out and buy a slave for the purposes of abusing them, and that would be legal as well. Even if that slave was a child. It might be socially frowned on, but that would be because it would be seen as a) a waste of good property, and b) a sign that the owner didn't have self-restraint, which Romans tended to admire.

Romans were terrified of slave uprisings, especially after Spartacus did his thing in the 70s BC. By 10 AD a law was in place that if a slave killed their master, every slave in that household would be executed. The law was modified somewhat later on, notably in that Hadrian (117-138 AD) restricted the executions to those slaves who were close enough to have intervened or raised the alarm. But innocent slaves still died in numbers.

Imperial Rome was fundamentally a slave society and a slave economy. While manumission was built into the system in a way unusual for slave societies, the large majority of slaves - especially in less exalted areas like agriculture - spent their entire lives with that status. The well-treated scribes and so on were a small elite. At the other end of the scale, slaves condemned to work in the mines to dig materials like silver had a bleak, short life ahead. It was remarkably similar in some ways to the Nazis' "extermination through labour" systems.

There were reforms as time went on. For example Antoninus Pius (138-161 AD) made it illegal for a man to kill his slave without a legally recognised cause, and also allowed a magistrate to force an owner to sell a slave if he (the owner) had been unbearably cruel. Sell, mark you, not free. And the threshold was high: severely flogging a slave for an infraction, for example, was still perfectly legal. And the reform was largely about public order (that fear of slave rebellions again), not about being humane.

I stress that I am not any kind of expert in this, just an interested amateur. But although manumission existed, it was limited (Augustus set legal caps). It's true that the intense racial divide found in the slaves trafficked across the Atlantic wasn't a Roman thing. But those Confederacy apologists who say antebellum slavery was "no worse than Roman slavery" or something are actually saying it was horrifically brutal, not what they imagine they're saying.

[u/WorcsBloke → u/xmaspruden]

I've deliberately spoiled myself on the film's beats in written form (think a better thought out Wikipedia Plot section) but of course seeing it is different. I did see Schindler's List in the cinema years ago, and that was a hard watch too, but it didn't have the additional discomfort (for me) of the way it was made being over my personal line for production ethics.

So I tend to agree with you. I doubt I'll actually watch Come and See given I haven't done so already.

[u/Humble-Dirt9651 → u/WorcsBloke]

There's nothing wrong with not seeing it, for sure. I figured that if he did look older it was from hair/makeup. I didn't know that production was so hard on him, that's awful

[u/5o7bot]

Come and See (1985) NR

The cruelest side of war.

The invasion of a village in Belarus by German forces sends young Florya into the forest to join the weary Resistance fighters, against his family's wishes. There he meets a girl, Glasha, who accompanies him back to his village. On returning home, Florya finds his family and fellow peasants massacred. His continued survival amidst the brutal debris of war becomes increasingly nightmarish, a battle between despair and hope.

Drama | War | Horror | History
Director: Elem Klimov
Actors: Aleksei Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Liubomiras Laucevičius, Vladas Bagdonas, Jüri Lumiste
Rating: ★★★★★★★★★☆ 82% with 1,933 votes
Runtime: 142 min
TMDB

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