Director – Ellen Kuras – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 116m
****
Former fashion model Lee Miller, played by producer Kate Winslet, reinvents herself as a war photographer for London Vogue at the start of World War Two – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 13th
It’s all too easy to assume (as per the ‘auteur’ theory espoused by the French ‘Cahiers du Cinema’ critics of the 1950s) that films are the works of directors. If one had to pick a single creative force behind this film, however, it would be the person who put it all together as producer before any director or writer were involved as collaborators.
That producer was the actress Kate Winslet who wanted to make a film about Vogue model turned photographer Lee Miller. Winslet doesn’t look much like the tall statuesque beauty that Lee Miller was in her younger days, and it didn’t occur to her to portray Lee Miller herself until some way into the process of putting the film together.
To direct the film, Winslet has chosen former cinematographer Ellen Kuras, an appropriate choice since Kuras has worked on documentaries shooting such musicians as David Byrne, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Neil Young, lensed narrative features on the such diverse cultural figures as Jane Goodall and Andy Warhol, and worked with unique film director Michel Gondry. As well as being skilled in the art of moving picture making, she is no stranger to photographing significant artistic and cultural figures, so in that sense, a narrative feature about Lee Miller fits right in to her body of work as a cinematographer.
Miller’s life didn’t conform to any rules, and broke boundaries left, right and centre. The film’s structure (insomuch as there is one) does much the same. Maybe some of that has come about in an editing process, whether in the earlier stages of constructing the screenplay or in the later stages of compiling the footage that was shot together into some sort of whole.
It opens with a sequence of Lee Miller under fire somewhere in a WW2 theatre of war, taking pictures and being hit by the force of a bomb blast, a sequence which will crop up again later in the narrative when it reaches that point in her story. You could describe that as a frame story of sorts, yet although it’s the scene that pulls you into the movie at the start, there’s a more significant frame story in which a young journalist named Tony (Josh O’Connor) interviews a much older Lee Miller, old enough, in fact, to be his mother.
Interspersed with this are incidents in Lee Miller’s life from about 1938 to about 1946, which take us through the immediate pre-war period and then the time she served as a war correspondent, including being one of the first people to enter – and document in photographs – the horrors of the Nazi death camps at Buchenwald and Dachau and later famously photographing herself taking a bath in Hitler’s bathroom not long after he and Eva Braun had committed suicide.
Many of the set with whom Miller hung around pre-war are featured in an early French picnic scene, in which Lee goes topless – among them French Vogue editor Solange D’Ayen (Marion Cotillard) and her husband Jean (Patrick Mille), Nusch Eluard (Noémie Merlant, also topless) and her poet husband Paul (Vincent Colombe). Surprisingly little attention is paid to Man Ray (Sean Duggan), the partner for whom she worked as an assistant in the 1930s, and Pablo Picasso (Enrique Arce).
The piece switches tone with the arrival in France of British surrealist painter and art historian Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård) who sweeps her off her feet and she accompanies back to London where she secures the Vogue photographer job under editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough) and endures English red tape preventing her from going to the Front until it dawns on her that she’s American, and that’s the way to get there. She soon finds herself working with Life magazine photographer David Sherman (comedian Andy Samberg in a rare and highly effective dramatic role), the pair finding they have an immediate artistic understanding and rapport.
There are some fine performances among the cast, not least from Winslet herself, although in terms of visual look, Riseborough’s austere yet stylish Withers wins hands down. Yet, good though the performances are, the film is not about that: it’s more of a journey inside the head of, into the feelings of, and through the eyes of the woman who took some of the most significant photographs of the twentieth century.
Lee is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 13th.
Trailer: