From the opening of the biographical drama Leededicated to photojournalist Lee Miller, the heroine-narrator informs us, during the first of many flashbacks set in the 1930s and 1940s, of what once pushed her to take up the camera. “I had been a model, I had been a muse… Now I ate and drank and made love and took photos, and I was good at it all. » Or, as she later sums it up: “I no longer wanted to be the photo: I wanted to take the photo. » This quest for agency is what moves the protagonist in the film directed by Ellen Kuras, but directed – and produced – by Kate Winslet.
In photography and journalism, the name of Lee Miller is among the most respected there is (a notoriety unfortunately mainly posthumous). An American expatriate in Europe, she documented the Second World War. Just after the conflict, his photos helped to understand the full extent of the Nazi horror.
Renowned cinematographer, Ellen Kuras (Summer of Sam ; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind/Head full of sun) achieves with Lee his first feature film. On a technical level, it’s a beautiful piece of work. Despite a budget that is not that of a blockbuster, the film has scale, breath, as well as a sense of historical detail.
The first act takes place under the sign of innocence, in 1938, in a villa in the south of France where Lee receives his friends. It’s very “campaign party between privileged people who are not very aware of it”. It was intended that way, since, as Lee explains in the “Present” section set in 1977, the subsequent shock was all the greater.
The second act sees Lee photographing London ravaged by bombs on a daily basis, then succeeding in going to the front. The third act recounts the end of the war, but also the beginning of awareness of the atrocities committed.
Throughout, Lee overcomes pitfalls related to her gender. The inequities and predation faced by women in general, but even more starkly in times of conflict, are recurring themes in the film.
Even the women involved are kept aside, we see. Others are manipulated, raped… Lee recognizes the latter; a shadow in her eyes, which she captures with her camera.
Winslet imposes
Here and there, the film errs on the side of didacticism and over-explanation: it is in the content of certain lines, or in the clumsy positioning of key confidences. Conversely, one aspect of the subject’s life that is never named, but is abundantly shown, is his alcoholism. However, curiously, the film never specifies that Lee Miller overcame her addiction to alcohol on her own.
In interview at Guardian in 2016, Antony Penrose, Lee Miller’s son and the author of the biography on which the scenario was based, declared that it was “by far the greatest achievement” of his mother. This omission in the segments taking place in 1977 is all the more inexplicable as the film strives to celebrate, rightly, the resilient and determined nature of Lee Miller. But hey: it is the prerogative of cinema to take the liberties of its choice.
The one-dimensionality of secondary partitions, on the other hand, constitutes an objective weakness. With the exception, perhaps, of Andrea Riseborough and her editor-in-chief of VogueMarion Cotillard, Noémie Merlant, Andy Samberg, Alexander Skarsgård and Josh O’Connor have the thankless task of creating an illusion of depth from sketches. It is really the “ show” by Kate Winslet, who impresses as usual.
The flashback structure is more or less happy. The process is certainly classic, but here, it appears a bit artificial, as does the aging makeup worn by the star. Two successive “revelations”, at the eleventh hour, complete the gimmick to this bias. But above all, ultimately, Lee Miller’s extraordinary destiny had no need for such ordinary artifices.