Ellen Kuras’s “Lee”
with Kate Winslet as World War II war correspondent-photographer Lee
Miller is an impressive bio-pic with a twist. The film’s narrative
is framed by an “interview” with a man who turns out to be
Miller’s son Antony Penrose (Josh O’Connor) on whose 1985
biography “The Lives of Lee Miller” the film is based.
Billed as a “fashion model
turned war correspondent”, Miller is much more interesting than
that. Kuras and Winslet show this in details on point for today:
Denied access in certain instances for being a “woman”, Miller
finds and shoots even better subjects at hand, such as women’s
diaphanous underwear drying in an Women’s Royal Air Force barracks
window and a woman pilot. Though some scenes make references to
Miller’s best known work, Kuras and Winslet do not mimic a
masterful image-maker’s life in pictures; rather, they reimagine
what the mind behind those pictures was like and lead a conversation
on their intriguing, multi-faceted subject. This conversation makes
the story.
Voguing in London: Editor Audrey
Withers (Andrea Riseborough) considers hiring photographer Lee Miller
(Kate Winslett) in Ellen Kuras’s “Lee”.
Miller’s immediate setting is
London’s Vogue magazine for which she modeled, subsequently became
a photographer, and ultimately shot her war photography, with editor
Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough) and Cecil Beaton (Samuel Barrett
in a precious comic turn). And though a formative part of Miller’s
intellectual development had been among international intellectual
circles in 1930s Paris (her day job at Vogue funded her experiments
with Man Ray in surrealism), her story is not told using famous male
artists and their careers and work as reference points. Nor does the
music swell to “validate” and underline didactic affirmation.
Miller did all her modeling with Vogue in the 1920s. This is a story
about one person’s life.
Petit
déjeuner sur l’herbe de
Midi: the French artistic upper crust time-out before the war.
As part of this life, Man Ray
(Seán Duggan), an important artistic collaborator for whom Miller
has been said to be a “muse”, and Pablo Picasso (Enrique Arce)
turn up among others. The poet Paul Éluard (Vincent Colombe) and his
wife Nusch (Noémie Merlant), French Vogue editor Solange D’Ayen
(Marion Cotillard) also make appearances, all disporting al fresco on
the French Riviera where Miller meets her future husband, the British
artist, art historian, and collector Roland Penrose (Alexander
Skarsgård). The group are incredulous that a blustering buffoon
could appear to inspire such mass reverence and a following in
Germany and elsewhere.
 |
Looking for the war: Life’s David Scherman (Andy Samberg) and Vogue’s Lee Miller (Kate Winslett) patrol for shots in World War II Normandy in Ellen Kuras’s “Lee”. |
The audience can see where this
story is going. When it gets there, and having a taste of war from
shooting for Vogue in London during the Blitz, Miller packs her bags
to do her part on the front. She must sign on with American forces to
do so: despite keeping calm and carrying on under the steady Nazi
aerial bombardment of London, British authorities would not send
women correspondents into [other] combat zones. Working with U.S.
press colleague David Scherman (Andy Samberg) from after the Allied
Normandy invasion to the Liberation of Paris, through the smoking
remains of Hitler’s Germany and his death camps to his apartment in
Munich, Miller realizes that “there are different kinds of wounds.
Not just the ones you can see.”
 |
Springtime for Hitler: The genuine article—Lee Miller (by David Scherman)—and her later-day stand-in Kate Winslet (by Ellen Kuras) wash off war grime in Hitler’s Munich apartment, April 1945. |
Lee
2023
U.K. (157 minutes) 55 Films/Brouhaha Entertainment/Hantz Motion
Pictures/Sky/Roadside Attractions. Directed by Ellen Kuras;
screenplay by Liz Hannah, Marion Hume, and John Collee, based on the
1985 Antony Penrose biography “The Lives of Lee Miller”;
cinematography by Pawel Edelman; editing by Mikkel E. J. Nielsen;
production design by Gemma Jackson; casting by Lucy Bevan, Olivia
Grant; music by Alexandre Desplat; produced by Kate Winslet, Lauren
Hantz, Marie Savare, Kate Solomon, Troy Lum, and Andrew Mason.
