A pioneer who preferred “taking pictures rather than being one”: in the film “Lee”, Kate Winslet plays the American Lee Miller, who broke conventions to establish herself as a great photojournalist of the 20th century, a major witness to Nazi atrocities.
Screened at the Deauville festival before its release in France on October 9, the film explores a pivotal period in the life of this powerful woman (1907-1977), a former model who photographed concentration camps and whose photo showing her, naked, in Hitler’s bathtub in Berlin has become legendary.
“Lee lived several lives and our biggest challenge was knowing which decisive period of his journey to highlight,” explains Kate Winslet in the press kit, keen to “avoid the biopic trap” for such a complex figure.
The first feature film from experienced cinematographer Ellen Kuras (“Eternal Sunshine of A Spotless Mind”), “Lee” is set first in the bourgeois and bohemian carefree atmosphere of the French Riviera in 1938.
Around Lee Miller, Man Ray’s former girlfriend turned fashion photographer, love is free, alcohol is abundant and no one deigns to see that Europe is on the brink of the precipice. Her small troupe includes the poet Paul Éluard, his wife Nusch (Noémie Merlant) and the fashion editor Solange d’Aye (Marion Cotillard).
Lee Miller then meets art collector Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgår), moves to London with him and struggles to go to France in 1944 to document — Rolleiflex camera slung over his shoulder — the horror of war.
The obstacles for a woman are legion and Lee Miller, who works for the British edition of Vogue, has to defy the prohibitions. “She was angry because women were not officially allowed in combat zones,” her only son, Antony Penrose, recalled to AFP at the end of May.
– “Believe it” –
With his colleague and friend from Life magazine David Scherman (played against type by American comedian David Samberg), Lee Miller brushes with death, photographs war disabled people, the first purges in France and reaches the Eastern Front, in a Germany that has just been defeated.
The reporter photographs families of Nazi suicides and, above all, enters the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald, where she discovers convoys filled with corpses and emaciated survivors.
“Instead of taking pictures from afar, Lee didn’t hesitate to climb aboard the train full of corpses,” Winslet points out.
Ellen Kuras’ camera does not stop at the gate of the camps. The film shows deportees in striped uniforms and reconstructs the interior of the Nazi camps, a frontal and risky choice that contrasts, for example, with the more oblique approach of the recent “Zone of Interest”, Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2023.
On her return to London, Lee Miller, scarred in her flesh, wanted to show these atrocities to the world but was refused by British Vogue. It was the American edition of the magazine that published her photo essay under the title “Believe it”.
“People didn’t believe it. It’s crazy how long we covered up whole sections of the Holocaust. There was a real desire to cover up the facts but Lee categorically refused. It ruined her – totally,” Kate Winslet emphasizes.
To portray this free, tortured and stubborn woman, the 48-year-old British actress stops at nothing: she bares all without hiding her curves and embraces dark circles and wrinkles to convey the physical and psychological exhaustion of her film double.
The star of “Titanic”, “The Reader” and “Revolutionary Weddings” even goes so far as to put on makeup to play an aging Lee Miller, addicted to drink and medication, who reluctantly unravels the thread of her existence in front of an intriguing journalist.
“She was driven by compassion and I think it consumed her,” her son said. “There was nothing left to keep her going and she couldn’t get all the things she had seen out of her head.”
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