Come and See
The cruelest side of war.
Иди и смотри (1985)
Production
Budget
$5 000 000
Revenue
$96 908
Director
Scenario
Ales Adamovich
Author
Composer
Oleg Yanchenko
Producer
Stepan Tereschenko
Actors
Aleksei Kravchenko
Flyora Gayshun
Olga Mironova
Glasha
Liubomiras Laucevicius
Kosach
Vladas Bagdonas
Rubezh
Jüri Lumiste
Obersturmführer
Viktors Lorencs
Sturmbannführer
Kazimir Rabetsky
Village Headman
Yevgeni Tilicheyev
Gezhel
Short description
Come and See is a Soviet war drama set in Belarus during the German occupation of 1943. Flyora, a teenage boy, digs a rifle out of the ground and joins the partisans in the forest despite his mother's objections. He meets a girl, Glasha, and returns with her to his village, where he finds the inhabitants slaughtered. What follows turns his survival into a drawn-out ordeal among the wreckage of war, set against the mass reprisals carried out against the civilian population.
Elem Klimov directed the film and wrote the screenplay with Ales Adamovich. It followed his earlier features Larisa, Agony: The Life and Death of Rasputin and Farewell, and was the fourth film he directed. Aleksei Kravchenko plays Flyora, with Olga Mironova as Glasha, Liubomiras Laucevicius as Kosach, Vladas Bagdonas as Rubezh, Jüri Lumiste and Viktors Lorencs. Mosfilm and Belarusfilm produced it with a budget of about five million dollars, and it runs 142 minutes.
Its reputation rests on a very wide base of approval rather than a narrow one: on IMDb it holds 8.3 out of 10 from roughly 121,000 votes, and on TMDB 8.2 out of 10 from close to two thousand. A critics' rating of 9.2 out of 10 from 60 reviews places professional assessment slightly above both audience scores. A credited cast of 34 and the sheer number of votes point to a film that has reached far beyond its original release.
What's left behind the scenes
- Best Film according to a poll by the magazine “Soviet Screen” in 1987.
- The film's scenes were shot in chronological order.
- This is Danny Boyle's favorite Soviet film.
- In 1987, the screenplay was published as a separate book in the series «Library of Screenplays».
- Aleksey Kravchenko had to lose a significant amount of weight for the role. The young actor was put on a strict diet, but he decided that wasn't enough and began running long distances to better embody the image of an emaciated child.
- Filming, which lasted 9 months, took place in the Berezina Reserve, near the village of Kamenka.
- In addition to blank cartridges, the film also used real ammunition. This was due to Klimov's desire for authenticity. Initially, pyrotechnics and explosive charges were planned, but after several takes, the director and cinematographer came to the conclusion that such explosions looked unnatural. After that, real shells were used, significantly increasing the risk to the actors' lives.
- To ensure the safety of the actors and the filming crew during the shooting of the scene with tracer bullets, they were positioned behind a concrete slab 1.5 meters high and 5 meters wide.
- In 1985, the film was submitted by the USSR as a contender for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but it was ultimately not nominated.
- To some detriment to authenticity, the Belarusian language had to be abandoned. According to Alexei Kravchenko, the decision was made during dubbing 'to create a mutant of Russian and Belarusian, because if I spoke in pure Belarusian, no one would understand anything.'
- Kravchenko was deeply impressed by the scene with the cow: live ammunition was used during filming, and when the first bullets hit, the animal reared up, nearly trampling the actor.
- The film is based on the works of Ales Adamovich, 'Khatyn Tale', 'Partisans', and 'Punishers'.
- The film's script was called 'Kill Hitler': the title was intended in a global sense, as a call to kill the devilish beginning, first and foremost, within oneself. The director understood that it would be a very brutal film and believed that few people would be able to watch it. After telling Adamovich this, Klimov heard in response: 'Let them not watch. We must leave this behind. As a testament to the war, as a plea for peace.'
- The lead actor, Alexei Kravchenko, admitted that he had no intention of participating in the auditions and went there at the request of a friend who desperately wanted to be in a movie and asked him to support him. At the auditions, Kravchenko was asked to perform an etude 'the death of a mother'. As the actor later confessed, he involuntarily cried so convincingly that even some members of the commission shed tears. Klimov, however, was not finally convinced and further 'tested' the candidate for the role. For example, one of these tests was watching newsreel footage from the war years, including footage from concentration camps. After several hours of viewing, Kravchenko was offered tea with cake, which the teenager firmly refused. This refusal met the director's expectations, who was testing the actor's ability to sincerely experience the grief and suffering of others.
- Olga Mironova, a student at an art college, was approved for the role of Glasha. For her, 'Come and See' was her first and last participation in cinema. After graduating from the college, Mironova became a school teacher.
- According to Klimov, the film seemed so shocking abroad that ambulances were stationed outside cinemas during screenings to take away overly sensitive viewers. During one discussion of the film, an elderly German stood up and said: 'I am a Wehrmacht soldier. Moreover, a Wehrmacht officer. I went through all of Poland, Belarus, and reached Ukraine. I testify: everything told in this film is true. And the most terrible and shameful thing for me is that my children and grandchildren will see this film.'
- Film critic Roger Ebert ('Chicago Sun-Times') in a 2010 review called Klimov's last work 'one of the most devastating films about war,' where, in his opinion, 'the living must envy the dead.' Noting that the theme of Hitler was quite safe and convenient as a political allegory in Soviet cinema, Ebert admitted that the film was much more than a simple allegory, and he had hardly seen a film that depicted human evil more relentlessly.
- Initially, the Goskino leadership did not approve the film's script: the scene where the main characters struggle through a swamp was perceived as 'propaganda of the aesthetics of dirt'; the crushed anthill – 'a humiliating comparison of our people to ants,' and the shooting of a cow in a nighttime field – 'naturalism' and 'savoring.' Objections were also raised to the scene of the village burning, as it 'lacked the scale of the partisan movement,' and Flora's refusal to shoot the infant Hitler, characterized by censors as 'all-forgiveness, abstract humanism, and a non-class approach.' Klimov refused to fulfill the demands of Goskino, as he considered them 'killing the film outright,' after which the film was shut down. The director continued to fight for the film, but only in 1984 was he able to begin filming. The only change made during this time was the film's title – 'Come and See' instead of the originally intended 'Kill Hitler.'
- Kazimir Rabetsky, a local villager who was on the same island where the filming took place during the war, played the village elder burned alive. His death monologue was filmed without hesitation and the need for dubbing, and Klimov later spoke of this case as an 'acting feat.'
- During the filming of the village burning scene, extras – local residents – were herded into a barn, but it proved impossible to achieve the desired level of emotion. Someone on the crew spread a rumor that 'the filmmakers might actually burn it down,' and one of the actors playing Germans fired a burst from a machine gun into the air. As a result, according to Klimov, 'such a human wail erupted from the barn that no actor could ever simulate.' A different problem arose with the younger extras: many of the young men and women invited to play partisans initially joked around and didn't take the work seriously. On the advice of Ales Adamovich, Klimov played songs from wartime over the loudspeakers, which effectively put the actors in a working mood.
- The effect of 'deafness' and ringing in the ears experienced by Flora after a shell exploded nearby was used by Steven Spielberg in the war drama 'Saving Private Ryan.'
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
