52 Films by Women Vol 8. 39. Lee (Director: Ellen Kuras)

Pictured: Kate Winslet as photographer Lee Miller in the drama 'Lee', set in the years 1938-1945.  The film is written by Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume and directed by Ellen Kuras. Still courtesy of Roadside Attractions (US), Sky (UK) 

Cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Summer of Sam, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) forged a career in directing for television on series such as Ozark, Brave New World and The Umbrella Academy. Lee, which follows seven formative years (1938-1945) in the life of American photographer Lee Miller, played by Spotless Mind co-star Kate Winslet, is Kuras’ first film for the big screen. Scripted by Liz Hannah, Marion Hume and John Collee, Lee plods from incident to incident, focussing on the background to some of Miller’s celebrated photographs taken during World War Two. It even has that most contrived of devices, the older Lee (Winslet in convincing make up) being interviewed at home by a young man (Josh O’Connor) and reluctant to engage with him. ‘What’s in it for me?’ she asks, her gaze cold, her voice raspy. However, after almost two hours of not engaging the audience with scenes that are collectively numbing – Lee is more archivist than artist and watching her click is a repetitive spectacle – the film flicks a switch and allows us to reinterpret what we have just watched, to invest it with meaning. The ending is emotional and dizzying.

The film begins with Lee in combat uniform running for cover. She crouches behind a wall, but an explosion nearby sends her backward, her face whitened with dust. A hand touches her shoulder. ‘We got to get you out of here,’ a soldier insists, irritation mixed with concern. After establishing the interview framing device, the film takes us back to 1938 in France, where at a Bohemian picnic – at least two women strip to the waist – Lee is introduced to her future husband, the English surrealist painter, Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård). Lee appraises Roland after he helps himself to a bottle of wine without asking, contemplating the flecks of paint on his fingers, ‘that you want us to see’. He describes her and is far less withering in his assessment. At night, she follows him upstairs to one of the guest bedrooms.

At the picnic, Lee refuses an offer to go back to Paris. ‘I don’t know who I am there.’ The sentence is a little on-the-nose. It doesn’t chime with Winslet’s delivery. She plays Lee as forthright, used to getting what she wants, experienced. Throughout the film, there are trite conversations about Hitler, Lee’s circle lacking the imagination to conceive of the horror to come. Part of the film shows Lee discovering that horror, capturing it and in one photograph in which she appears, commenting on it. ‘I don’t want to be the model anymore, or the muse,’ she explains, even though it is hard to imagine Winslet’s Lee being the muse for anyone. There’s no light and shade in the performance. Rather Winslet’s Lee is the proverbial shark, constantly moving forward. There’s an asexuality to her, even in scenes of partial nudity.

The film doesn’t directly refer to Jewish people, rather just people. ‘People have disappeared,’ says Lee. ‘Where have they gone?’ At the front, Lee acts with compassion, translating the words of a woman accused of being a collaborator. The woman is innocent, Her accuser less so. Powerless to intervene, Lee witnesses the shaving of two women’s heads, judged as collaborators for sleeping with Germans.

Kuras and her writers isn’t interested in the conundrum of Lee marrying a conscientious objector – Roland - yet wanting to head to the combat zone to photograph war. Furthermore, Lee never discusses America. It is as if Kuras didn’t want to make her English star criticise the US, having effectively taken the role of Lee Miller away from an American actress. Winslet does not seem as natural on screen as her British co-star Andrea Riseborough, who plays Audrey Withers, the editor of British Vogue, whom Lee approaches for a job. Adopting a clipped, received pronunciation English accent, Riseborough’s Audrey gaily greets Lee then takes her side against the disagreeable but ‘quite brilliant’ Cecil Beaton (Samuel Barnett) whose name is mentioned in full because, well, he’s famous. It’s true, Audrey explains, the magazine doesn’t have much money, but she will keep Lee’s application on file. It isn’t long before Lee is put to work.

The British refuse to send a woman correspondent to Europe to photograph the war. But then Lee is reminded that she is American; the British Government cannot stop her. However, she encounters a new prohibition: no women reporters are allowed in the briefing room. Hiding her hair under a helmet, she sneaks in anyway, only to be reminded of protocol. Lee finds herself photographing women’s underwear drying on a clothesline. ‘Only a woman could have taken that photograph,’ says Audrey in admiration, much to the chagrin of the aesthetically displeased Cecil. Within the confines of her role, Riseborough has fun. 

Pictured: British Vogue editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough, left) inspects the portfolio of photographer Lee Miller (Kate Winslet, right) in a scene from the drama, 'Lee', directed by Ellen Kuras. Still courtesy of Roadside Attractions (US), Sky (UK)

There are only so many photographs that Lee can take on the army base for British Vogue. Eventually, she is permitted to accompany the soldiers. She meets war correspondent, David E. Scherman (Andy Samberg, dialled down), who helps her with some lighting. Soon fast friends, there is a will-they-won’t-they aspect to their relationship. How can two people cover the war without sex getting in the way. At one point, Lee lies next to David, fully clothed, just to talk. David is enraptured by her. When Roland pays Lee a surprise visit to get her to come home and David listens to them getting intimate, we feel his discomfort.

Although Lee doesn’t discuss America, she is indirectly critical of American soldiers, rescuing a woman from a GI attempting to rape her. Lee shows the GI a knife. ‘I thought she’d want to show gratitude,’ whimpers the GI, referring to the US role in liberating the area. Lee gives the woman her knife for protection.

Staying in Europe to search for the ‘missing people’, Lee heads for Berlin, on the way photographing a train carriage full of dead people, partial evidence of the Holocaust. She asks for David’s help to get inside the carriage before taking photographs, gagging from the smell of rotting flesh. Kuras doesn’t replicate Miller’s photography in the mise-en-scene, though in the closing credits, she shows Miller’s actual photographs, including her most provocative one, comparing it to a still of Winslet.

Pictured: War correspondent David E. Scherman (Andy Samberg) takes a walk with compatriot Lee Miller (Kate Winslet) in a scene from the drama, 'Lee', directed by Ellen Kuras. Still courtesy of Roadside Attractions (US), Sky (UK)

Bribing a soldier with cigarettes, Lee and David enter Hitler’s pied a terre, where American soldiers are shown to be helping themselves to the Fuhrer’s drinks cabinet. Once inside, they are offered drinks and cigarettes and see Hitler’s Nazi insignia silverware put to use. Lee is appalled, but when she visits Hitler’s bathroom answering a call of nature, she has an idea. She summons David inside to help her take a photograph and sits inside Hitler’s bathtub. ‘Don’t show my boob or the censors won’t allow it,’ Lee tells David, before the picture is taken. Fortunately for them, there isn’t a queue.

Having taken so many harrowing and challenging photographs, Lee is appalled to learn that British Vogue didn’t publish any of them. The British Government wanted to ensure that the armistice would be successful, Audrey explains after Lee bursts into her office and starts tearing up her unused work. ‘You can’t destroy those, they are history,’ cries Audrey. She explains that she sent a set of photographs to American Vogue, who does eventually publish them.

Roland remains obsessed with blue paint and at one point covers Lee with it. Their scene of artistic creation – Roland painting Lee’s breasts – is conducted with the urgency of a couple having sex for the purpose of having a child, only Roland is doing the ovulating. This is one of the few scenes that approaches humour.

Lee is reunited with her Paris friends, though finds Solange (Marion Cotillard) sitting on the floor in an empty house is a traumatised state. She wants to be there when her husband comes home, though this seems unlikely. Solange’s pain is something that Lee can only observe and not ease, an understated but recurrent motif; Lee can no more reach her than she could the two women having their heads shaved. There is the suggestion that simply observing might be an act of negligence.

The Lee of Kuras’ film doesn’t have an emotional arc. The film is partly about the work existing outside a person’s life – it is not autobiographical – but being integral to it. This point is made in the final scene which, in its way, is breathtaking. If you find yourself shifting awkwardly in your seat watching Lee, I offer you an Americanism: stick with it.

 

Reviewed at Finsbury Park Picturehouse Screen One, North London. Wednesday 4 September 2024, 17:45 ‘Film Club’ screening