Idi i smotri*
Director: Elem Klimov
Writer: Ales Adamovich, Elem Klimov
Cast: Aleksey Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Liubomiras Lauciavicius

Plot:
Florya (Aleksey Kravchenko) wants to fight as a soldier in WW2, despite being way too young. And despite being way too young, one rather disheveled group of soldiers takes him on. But the more Florya is drawn into the atrocities of war, the more he realizes the severity of it all. Slowly this takes a toll on his mind.

Idi i smotri has its moments but mostly its long and really loud. I could have gone on with my life without problem had I never seen it.

I’m really not very sensitive when it comes to noise and volume. Not hearing particularly well and growing up in a big family will do that to you. Despite that I spent long stretches of this film with my ears covered because it was just too loud. And not because of the cinema – most scenes were at a normal volume and the dialogues always were – but because of the sound mixing. When a movie becomes this loud, it’s uncomfortable – to put it mildly – and it makes the entire movie experience worse.

Not that I was entirely sold on the movie, even if it had been a silent film. It took too long to get started. For some things I felt that I really lacked the (cultural) context to understand what was actually going on and on some the film was just cryptic [a case can be made that they tried to convey the incrompehensibility of war but to me it was mostly tiring]. Some things I didn’t know if they wanted to make them cartoonish (some facial expressions for example) or if that just happened. In any case I was consistently jolted out of the film because of that. And I think that they killed and abused some of the animals they shot with which really doesn’t help either.

There were some really good things about it, though. Klimov puts together some beautiful and very effective images. My “favorite” was when [SPOILERS] Florya returns home with Glasha (Olga Mironova) and they run from the house in search of Florya’s sisters. As they run, Glasha turns around and you just see a pile of bodies behind the house for a split-second. [/SPOILERS] That literally gave me goosebumps.

Plus, there was Aleksey Kravchenko who has a wonderfully expressive face (which he needs for all the close-ups he had to do) and he does a great job portraying Florya (aided a little bit by the nicely subtle make-up). But in the end that just means that he was better than the film he was in.

Summarizing: not my thing.

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*I found this film on a Top 100 Horror Movies list and when I saw that they played it at the Filmmuseum, I decided I had to give it a try. Surprisingly it is not a horror movie at all but a straight up war movie (and I’ve seen too much of that with Thin Red Line and War Horse [yes, I know it’s a play, I still count it] recently).