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| Aleksey Kravchenko in Come and See |
Elem Klimov's hard and harrowing Come and See runs a risk that it almost doesn't avoid: Parts of it are filled with such sustained horror and tension that a viewer can grow almost numb and dismissive. It elicits the response: "It's only a movie. These are actors." But such actors, especially Aleksey Kravchenko, then only 14 and picked by the director precisely for his lack of acting experience, even though Klimov was concerned that putting him through what the character must undergo in the film might be damaging to his mental health. (Kravchenko apparently survived intact, and went on to study acting and to build a steady career in film and television.) It's perhaps worth comparing the intensity of Klimov's film to that of Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent (1977), which put its actors through real hardships to create its portrait of life during wartime. Shepitko, married to Klimov, died in an automobile accident in 1979, and her film almost seems like a challenge to her husband to match or excel. In fact, Come and See seems to have exhausted Klimov as a filmmaker: He didn't make another film for the remainder of his life; he died at 70 in 2003. As harsh as the realism of Come and See is, it also has poetic touches in its cinematography and use of landscape, reminding me of another film about a war-torn boyhood, Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (1966).
