This is one of the major trends in contemporary cinema: building statues. One by one, from Winston Churchill to Freddie Mercury or Marilyn Monroe, all artistic, sporting or political figures are entitled to their biopic. The American photographer Lee Miller is now added to this gallery while in Saint-Malo (Ille-et-Vilaine), the Victoire Chapel exhibits his photos of the liberation in 1944. Lee Miller also haunts the Museum Baron-Martin de Gray (Haute-Saône), on the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to Man Ray of which she was one of the models.
“Lee Miller” directed by Ellen Kuras with Kate Winslet.
Lee Millera film by Ellen Kuras, is based on the worn-out principle of the interview. A young man visits Lee Miller who tells him about his life. The storyline focuses on his war years and the journey that will make a former American model the correspondent of the Vogue British on the French front. Vaguely sepia-toned photography, list of celebrities, remarkable performance by Kate Winslet in the title role, Lee Miller follows the obligatory passages of the genre without much energy.
There remains an interesting idea, however: the film chooses as its climax a very particular cliché in the work of Lee Miller. On April 30, 1945, after photographing the Dachau concentration camp, she arrived in Munich, in the deserted apartment of Adolf Hitler, accompanied by the photographer of Life David Scherman. Exhausted, Miller pushes open the bathroom door. Suddenly, overcome by a stunning flash of inspiration, she fixes her frame, adjusts her light, arranges the decor, takes off her clothes and dives into the bathtub. Scherman just has to press the shutter button.
“Lee Miller” directed by Ellen Kuras with Kate Winslet and Marion Cotillard.
Is this cult photo really the strongest in Lee Miller’s work? In the vast corpus of war testimonies, it is unlike any other. By washing himself clean of the mud of Dachau in the face of his own objective, Miller closes the war. She becomes a model again, abandons the capture of reality to invent a staging which links her to her surrealist roots and to what the Nazis described as “degenerate art”. The film adds a context to this cliché, perhaps fictionalized, and this line of dialogue: “Leave my tits out of the shot, otherwise we’ll never get past the censors.” » If the worst battles were won, the images remained subject to the corset.
