Russian filmmaker Elem Klimov (1933-2003) once confided to his long-time screenwriter, Ales Adamovitch, that even if he managed to finish the war story he was working on -- the harrowing but magnificent Come and See (1985) -- no one would be able to bear to watch it. "But," he continued to Adamovitch, "we have to make it all the same." And it was duly -- and brilliantly -- made. And Klimov was right: It is almost unbearable.
The film, which was to be the filmmaker's last, is a relentlessly powerful account of the brutal Nazi advance through Byelorussia in 1941 and 1942, told through the eyes of a 12-year-old Byeloruissian boy (astonishingly well played by Alexei Kravchenko), who, after his family is massacred, joins with the partisans to fight back. The boy, who ages before our eyes, lives terrified in the forest and, at the film's end, bears unwilling witness to the Nazi destruction of the village of Perehody, where the inhabitants are herded into a barn, which is then set on fire -- a horrifyingly, unsparingly filmed scene of an unspeakable deed that, the film announces at the end, was repeated in almost 700 Byelorussian villages. The film, which is sometimes compared, appropriately, to Andrei Tarkovsky's masterful Ivan's Childhood, is. . . well, I was going to say that it's not pretty, but that would be wrong. Though distressing, it is in fact utterly, almost puzzlingly beautiful to look at -- like all of Klimov's films.
A case in point is his opulent, dizzyingly brilliant film Rasputin (a.k.a. Agony or Agonia) from 1975 -- largely unavailable until the late eighties and now restored. Though it tells the reasonably well-known story of the mad monk and his sexually charged, hypnotic power over Czarina Alexandra, Rasputin proceeds as an electrifying cinematic banquet, mixing and matching filmic styles and approaches (colour and black and white, stills and hectic passages of grainy documentary film) to the point where you feel just about as plunged into decadence as the court of the long-suffering Czar Nicholas II felt. Towering over the film like a dirty, leering colossus is the unforgettably compelling Alexei Petrenko as Rasputin, whose unnaturally gleaming eyes -- which have the force of locomotive headlights -- push the film into what critic J. Hoberman in The Village Voice called "an almost frenzied delirium."
Come and See screens today at 8 p.m. at Cinematheque Ontario, AGO's Jackman Hall, 417 Dundas St. W., with Klimov's film Welcome, or No Trespassing at 6:30 p.m. Rasputin screens April 24 at 6:30 p.m.