“Who do you want to be now Lee Miller and what are you going to do about that?” asks one of the characters during the film when talking to the protagonist. If you have never heard the name Lee Miller before, Lee will give you an insight into the life of the famous war journalist by following the beginning of her career as a photographer and her significant contribution to journalism during the Second World War.
Lee follows the titular character (Kate Winslet), a former model from the United States. The film starts in France in 1938 when Lee meets Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård). Their relationship leads Lee to move to London where she will abandon her career as a model and enlist as a photographer for Vogue Magazine. As the most crucial events of World War II start impacting her life and the lives of everyone around her, Lee does anything in her power to be sent to the front as a photographer. In doing so, she faces the gender-based discrimination that becomes apparent in the way she is treated, especially compared to her male counterparts, including war journalist David Scherman (Andy Samberg).
The movie does a really good job at showing the harsh realities of the war: there is no glorifying of the conflict in this movie, something that so often happens when it comes to movies about World War II. At the same time, we also get a really good idea of who Lee is as a person as the film goes on and we get an insider look at her thoughts and hopes during her career. Kate Winslet delivers a stellar performance as the main character, paired with an excellent Ady Samberg who proves to be as excellent in a serious role – if not even more – as he is with comedy.
It is also a poignant reflection on the importance of photography to preserve history. As Lee risks everything to take her pictures, we do inevitably wonder about how life-changing these pictures – and their publications in a magazine – will be to our collective memory of the war. However, the main theme of the film would have been a lot more powerful if Lee had shown us the actual pictures that the real Miller took during the film. Instead, we only see them at the end of the movie: they are incredibly fascinating to look at and I wish they had been spotlighted a lot more during the film.
I also wish the film would have explored the characters more: we know next to nothing about her friend in France or her boyfriend which makes it significantly hard to care about any of them when they come back later in the film. There is a lot about the main character herself that I wanted to see more of: her past as a model is often referred to but never shown at all, for example. The same can be said for her life after the war, which is only truly explored in the last few shots of the film as it tries to go for a series of twists that don’t quite land nor have the time to be explored properly.
While Lee could have been structured a lot better narratively, this does not take anything away from the very powerful impact that the film is bound to have on its audience. For those of us who may not have been familiar with the photographer – or, indeed, the photographs that she took during the war – it is also an excellent way to learn more about this important historical figure. Similarly, the film feels like a very powerful way of honouring her memory and everything she dedicated her life to, especially with the final intertitles at the end that remind us of the real-life story behind the film.
★★★1/2
In UK cinemas 13th September 2024 / Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Andrea Riseborough, Andy Samberg, Noemie Merlant, Alexander Skarsgård, Josh O’Connor / Ellen Karas / 15 / Sky Cinema
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