Kate Winslet powerfully plays the former model turned war photographer in Ellen Kuras’ film. A classic story, but which has the merit of making this audacious and stubborn woman known.
Kate Winslet plays the lead role in the film directed by Ellen Kuras, “Lee Miller” (released October 9), a former model who became one of the first female war photographers. But the role of the star of “Titanic” goes well beyond: co-producer of the feature film, she is at the origin of this project which was close to her heart, in addition to the financing, she was notably responsible for the casting, the director (renowned cinematographer, for whom this is the first fiction film), the prestigious supporting roles, a talented technical team (photography, sets, costumes, etc.), up to the composer Alexandre Desplat.
The American Lee Miller was a model, an artists’ model, a muse of Man Ray… based in France, she frequented artists and intellectuals, writers, painters, Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, Picasso, Cocteau… A sequence from the film thus evokes the joyful and carefree pre-war summers on the French Riviera, where she meets her future husband, the art dealer Roland Penrose (played by Alexander Skarsgard), whom she follows to London.
From now on, she preferred to take photos rather than pose, and when the Second World War came Lee Miller was a photographer for Vogue, the magazine for which she had once posed. Like all these mobilized women, she participated in the war effort with her reports, chronicling the Blitz in London. To her great annoyance, no woman was sent to the front, it was not until the summer of 1944 that she arrived in Normandy with the American army, war correspondent for British Vogue, with her camera photo Rolleiflex and its portable typewriter.
An exhibition in Saint-Malo
At first, she was only authorized to photograph field hospitals, then in August she was sent to Saint-Malo, a city which “should be pacified” but is not yet. A sequence from the film thus traces the bloody liberation of the Breton city, where Lee Miller was the only photo-reporter present. In five days in the ruined city, bombed with napalm, she took 300 historical photos, around fifty of which are presented in an exhibition in Saint-Malo (until November 3).
Then, it’s the Liberation of Paris, where she finds her friends from the good years, Solange d’Ayen (played by Marion Cotillard), Nush Eluard (Noémie Merlant, currently in “Emmanuelle”)… and understands that those who come from were terrible, she discovers the reality of the Occupation, the prison, the deportation, the executions… With David Scherman, photographer from Life magazine (played by Andy Samberg), Lee Miller follows the progression of the American army in Germany, goes “to the heart of hell” and fixes in his lens all the horrors of the Second World War: the fighting, the shaved women, the families of Nazi dignitaries committing suicide in Leipzig, and the unspeakable of the concentration camps. death, in Buchenwald and Dachau, the mass graves, the piled up corpses…
Historical documents
His photos from the camps were not published at first, as they were too unbearable while victory was being celebrated in London. It will be some time before they are recognized as the historical documents that they are. The film also recreates the taking of his famous photos, including this photo of Lee Miller taking a bath in Hitler’s bathtub, in his Munich apartments.
Presented at the opening of the Deauville American Film Festival, Ellen Kuras’ film presents a classic staging, with a superficial process of successive flashbacks, her son Antony questioning Lee Miller about this past about which he knows almost nothing. But Kate Winslet puts all her passion into the incarnation of this daring and stubborn woman, energetic and free, and the great merit of this feature film is to make this exceptional story known.
Patrick TARDIT
“Lee Miller”, a film by Ellen Kuras, with Kate Winslet (released October 9).
Exhibition “Lee Miller, Saint-Malo under siege, August 1944”, Chapelle de la Victoire in Saint-Malo, until November 3.
