Lee Miller **
d’Ellen Kuras
American film, 1h57
On April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide in Berlin. The same day, American war reporter Lee Miller took a bath in her Munich apartment. A photograph immortalizes this moment, with a washcloth on the shoulder and muddy boots on the bath mat. Ellen Kuras’ film, which reconstructs this image with its offbeat glamour, recalls the high price paid by the photographer to be there.
Model Lee Miller decided to take photos rather than be the subject. The biopic begins in 1938 with his meeting with the Englishman Roland Penrose, an artist close to the surrealists, in a house in the south of France where Paul and Nusch Éluard, Jean and Solange d’Ayen were staying in particular. Roland and Lee went to live in London, and in 1940 they learned that their French friends had joined the Resistance. Hired at VogueLee Miller cannot be satisfied with his activity as a fashion photographer. She wants to produce reports from the front, where the British general staff refuses to send women. But, in 1942, the American army gave him authorization.
From fashion photos to war reporting
This classic biopic, constructed from an interview from 1977, the year of Lee Miller’s death, and returns to the past, has the intelligence to focus on the decade around the Second World War. It was during this period that the photographer earned her stripes as a war reporter and acquired, with her partner David Scherman, the reputation of arriving everywhere first, her Leica hanging around her neck.
Intense, Kate Winslet plays this go-getter and charismatic woman, but scarred by sexual abuse suffered in childhood. Lee Miller sinks ever deeper into the war, which she documents with photos meticulously replayed by the film: wounded American soldiers, shaved French women, traumatized civilians, corpses in death wagons and extermination camps… Striking images which then appear in their original version in the hands of the journalist who came to interview Lee Miller in the 1970s.
Of certain photographs, she will never obtain publication in Voguelike those of the extermination camps. It was only in the 1990s that they were revealed thanks to the dogged work of his son and biographer, Anthony Penrose.
Related News :