Come and See (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

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We experience the German invasion of Belarus through Flyora (Aleksey Kravchenko), a teenager who joins the local partisan militia after discovering a rifle buried in the sand. Glascha (Olga Mironova), a lovely young girl, befriends him, but the two are caught in the midst of an air raid which leaves Florya nearly deaf. As they journey, the soundtrack is filled with alarmingly loud bombs and explosions that almost sound like a hellish symphony of classical music conducted by evil, complete with screams, dead carcasses, and flies eating the flesh of the dead.

Despite the fleeting nature of her glance, the image sticks with the viewer, its horror reverberating throughout the film because Klimov doesn’t give it redemptive or revelatory power.This Criterion release comes with a monaural soundtrack that according to the booklet was remastered from the 35mm magnetic track. Criterion Booklet - A fully illustrated booklet with tech specs, cast, and crew info, along with essays by Mark le Fanu and Valzhyna Mort, covering the movie. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising.

It’s a cinematic simulacrum of the overwhelming, discombobulating sensory experience of war that would have an influence on virtually every war movie made after it. The film’s sound design and mix are both remarkably elaborate and it seems to get more intense as the film progresses. The 1080p/24hz high-definition encode is sourced from a new 2K restoration performed by Mosfilm and scanned from the 35mm original negative. It is set almost entirely from a single perspective, the young Flyora, played by a wildly talented Aleksei Kravchenko; I appreciate the raw, grainy documentary approach and personal story conveyed here.

The early scene in which he departs from his mother and sisters presents a disconcerting, even alienating complex of emotions: the histrionic panic of his mother (Tatyana Shestakova), who alternately embraces and rails against him; the hardened indifference of the soldiers who’ve come to retrieve him; and the jejune oblviousness of Floyria himself, who mugs at his younger siblings to mock his mother’s concerns.

The supplemental features on the disc include rerelease trailer; archival interview with the director; xclusive new video interview with German Klimov; new interview with cinematographer Roger Deakins; archival programs; and more. A full third of the Nazis’ innocent victims were killed in mass executions on the Eastern Front—both by specially assigned SS troops and the regular Wehrmacht (though the myth of a “clean Wehrmacht” lives on to this day). And yet, in a crucial sense, there’s hardly a more clear-sighted or realistic fiction film about World War II. Fine object-detail really dives off of the screen in every shot, from fine hairs and wrinkles found in the numerous close-ups throughout the film, to the trees, vegetation, and debris presented in longer shots.

His childlike charm as seen in the first couple minutes of the movie where he and a young friend are playing in the sand, looking for buried rifles of soldiers all comes to a screeching halt sooner rather than later as young Flyora faces the intense nightmare of war. Background score: Score is more about sound effects while using basic instruments such as the harmonica. Nearly blocked from being made by Soviet censors, who took seven years to approve its script, Come and See is perhaps the most visceral, impossible-to-forget antiwar film ever made. Overall it’s a stunner of a presentation, just as pleasing as what Stalker offered, and it’s an enormous improvement over what was available previously.