Kate Winslett turns in another bravura performance in LEE.
The story begins in the South of France 1938, where model turned photographer, Lee Miller is vacationing with her dearest and closest friends, a bunch of artists, poets, and philosophers. She enjoys a drink, a smoke and relaxing bare chested in Bohemian rhapsody. Once the subject of the avant-garde photographer Man Ray, Lee, now tired of being viewed through a lens and by men, is focused exclusively on her own work as a photographer.
Into this coterie comes the art dealer, Roland Penrose, and the attraction is spontaneous and mutual.
The threat of war looms over Europe and almost overnight everything about their daily lives changes completely. The Nazis invade Poland and Lee Miller captures Roland, and returns with him to his home town of London, where she seeks out work as a photographer for British Vogue. The rhapsody becomes a melancholy melody.
Frustrated by the restrictions placed on female photographers at the time,
who are limited to documenting life on the home front, and tired of hearing that women are expected to “do their duty” whilst the “men get to decide what that is!”, Miller urges her female boss at British Vogue, Audrey Withers, to request permission from the Ministry of Information for Lee to go to the front line.
Unlike the many male photographers who have the automatic right to go, Miller is turned down. Eventually, after exhausting the British systems, American born Lee gains her own US War Accreditation and heads off to Europe. Alone.
After battling her way through the siege of Saint Malo, and subsequently photographing one of the first ever uses of Napalm, Lee joins forces with close friend and fellow photographer David E. Scherman.
Lee and Scherman capture on camera the liberation of Paris, they sneak into Hitler’s abandoned Munich home — where Scherman captures Miller bathing in der Führer’s tub. And they are among the first photographers to enter the camps at Buchenwald and Dachau on the day of the liberation, where Lee crafts a series of horrifying, urgent images that will sear themselves into history.
Directed by renowned and award winning cinematographer Ellen Kuras, and written by Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume, LEE is a high calibre biopic, anchored by a strong central character and an extraordinary supporting cast that includes Marion Cotillard, Andrea Riseborough and Noémie Merlant
LEE is a vivid and timely reminder of the bold women who fought to penetrate male-dominated spaces, but also of the brave war correspondents who today in the Middle East, Ukraine and elsewhere who make great sacrifices in their reporting.
