Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
You got that right . . .
Internet research on World War II led me to a list of “best WW II movies of all time,” which I can’t find at the moment, but which contained a lot of obvious choices (Bridge over the River Kwai, for example) and some films I’d never heard of before. Enter Come and See, of which the list-writer raved, so I thought what the hell. And put it on my Netflix queue.
Tried to watch it tonight. It was incomprehensible to me, perhaps because there’s a vocabulary at play that I do not understand. I noted many sequences of screaming, there were people running around, there was our protagonist looking empty and/or horrified, and things kept getting worse and worse.
It was the best movie I’ve ever fast-forwarded through.
That Wikipedia article has a quote from one of the screenwriters:
I understood that this would be a very brutal film and that it was unlikely that people would be able to watch it.
Yup.
I wanted to appreciate this film. I really did. But I couldn’t even manage to watch it beyond the first half.
D.
I’ll ask my husband if he’s seen it. If he recommends it, maybe I’ll give a try when I need to be depressed. The Soviet/Russian experience of WWII was horrifying and almost every family lost someone. Belorussia was really flatten in the war (Wikipedia says they lost 1/3 of their population). In Minsk there were only a few structures left standing at the end. The Soviets used German POW labor until the mid-1950s to rebuild. The Great Patriotic War still lives on along with the few remaining veterans. I was in Moscow for Victory Day this year and it’s still a real celebration. I don’t think anyone in the U.S. still celebrates VE Day, except for maybe some American Foreign Legion posts.
Before watching (part of) the movie and reading the Wikipedia article on it, I’d had no idea that the Germans had murdered their way across Byelorussia. And I hadn’t known about the Russians using German POWs until the mid-50s — interesting. (Karen knew this, but then, history has never been my strong suit.)
I think my favourite war movie is ‘A Walk in the Sun’. Once you get past the sensibilities of the 40’s (‘fucking’, which every soldier used liberally, is replaced with ‘loving’) and the fact that it is so very different from other war movies, you’ll perhaps appreciate that this is what it would have been like for a foot soldier in World War II.
Most westerners know little of the Russian campaign. Few people make movies about it, few books are written. It’s a shame, really – the war was decided on that front, and if you want a war on which you could make movies with lots of bombing and shooting, well, that would be the war to make movies on. The brutality and the sheer scale of the casualties are mind-numbing.