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Virginal gaze and Nature's embroidery for the first shot, the craning camera literally sweeps the boy off his feet until the awakening breaks the spell—by the end of the opening credits, the realms of dreams and battlefields, of cuckoos and barbed wire, have been braided. Ivan (Kolya Burlyayev) is a tough kid, sharp-faced and vengeful, a tiny partisan wading through the Russian front during World War II. The lieutenant (Yevgeni Zharikov) receives him skeptically, then gets distracted by a vague romantic triangle involving himself, a brash captain (Valentin Zubkov), and the medical assistant (Valentina Malyavina). "War's no place for girls, war's no place for children," say the men, hoping to impose order on chaos. Andrei Tarkovsky's world, prodigiously tactile yet swarming with symbols: The jagged remains of a bombed-out cabin are a Franz Kline canvas, the captain kissing the medic while holding her over a trench is a moment of connection above the void. The lad tries to seize a celestial reflection at the bottom of a well while his mother is killed, the maiden's smitten POV swooning across the birch forest is undercut by machine-gun fire, throttled corpses welcome the next shot. "A scouting mission?" "No, a picnic with your phonograph." A most concentrated pictorialism turns the arched ceiling and scrawled wall of a cramped hideout into a miniature cathedral, Dürer prints are spoils of war, rear-projection and negative film-stock abstract the innocence of an apple-truck ride. The ghost of Dovzhenko is visible throughout, a premonition of Andrei Rublev's great bell briefly fills the screen. In the ashes of the aftermath, a dazed soldier: "You were killed and I survived. I must think about this." Klimov's Come and See takes it apart, brutally. Cinematography by Vadim Yusov. With Stepan Krylov, Nikolay Grinko, Dmitri Milyutenko, and Irma Raush. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |