Lee
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. Everyone was naked and avant-garde until sizzling Alexander Skarsgård (Roland Penrose) arrived, and even he wouldn’t stay clothed for long. Even if he did end up working in camouflage.
Apart from the Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe casual nude dining and possibly Man Ray lounging around, Lee is actually a memorial to a complex woman — and a complicated world. I like the fact that we see her framing some of her shots, or the overwhelm of a civilian being in a war zone for the first time. It’s also about a woman fighting to be woman who is respected as a professional (and still a woman) in a man’s world. With charm, personability and street smarts, Lee faces up to to the gut churning job given to her (photographing the hospital tents and their casualties) and wins a reward of going to the front line.
What the movie does exceptionally well is to smash Holocaust denial forever — through the moving revealing way in which it shows Lee and her partner in crime, David E. Scherman (Andy Samberg), going East in search of the missing people. Destinations apparently unknown. Whilst I wish it showed more of the back story — most photographers and photojournalists were being sick when they entered the death camps. Consequently, Lee Miller was remarkable in that she could feel the revulsion, muffle up against the stench and yet stare at horror with her lens long enough to capture the truth for everyone else to know — and see. I wept — it was the feet that did it. Human feet are so individual, so vulnerable, so… innately human… Rather than linger on ‘corpses’, the jumbled up heaps of naked emaciated bodies, the murdered, starved and tortured, instead the camera focused on feet and their fragile humanity. Pulling open closed up railway trucks to find the dead inside made me gasp, more so when they lit up a gas chamber piled with the dead. Most of all, it’s the small girl absolutely terrified of interactions with strange adults in uniform. Much like the heaps of shoes, hair, suitcases and teeth, it’s such a personal revelation — and such an unspeakable, word stealing horror. The missing people were gone, destroyed by an evil regime. Whilst it can be easy (at such a time remove) to dismiss, forget, become passive, the cinematography of Pawel Edelman, the way that the camera gradually, sensitively pans in, the pacing and use of impactful images punched back with all the vileness, the evil of the Holocaust — and the wickedness of acts against human life and dignity — the old women and men, the tiny children, pushed onto trains by a hate-fueled regime.
This is then contrasted with the waste of human life in the shots of deceased Nazis, who almost look like they’re sleeping, and the middle class opulence of Hitler’s HQ. Everything is so tidy and clean, so comfortable, so immediate — it’s equally sickening in a different way. What a waste of life because of one man and his influence. No wonder Lee Miller leapt into Hitler’s bath and sullied his pristine ecru bath mat. Weird too is to move from the starving and recently liberated to American invasion forces cheerfully occupying a former Nazi elite home. It’s strange too how all the insignia is left up — I wonder if this was dramatic license, surely the occupying forces would have got to work destroying these remnants immediately.
Sometimes it’s hard to work out who is who in this movie. Cecil Beaton (Samuel Barnett) hissy-fits in and out in a flounce through the movie; Andrea Riseborough as Audrey Withers plays a terrific part as editor of Vogue doing their bit for the war effort and managing all her emotional contributors. We also learn so much about what culturally people were prepared to deal with. The British government wouldn’t permit Vogue UK to public Miller’s photographs of the camps to avoid any further public ‘distress’, whilst American Vogue would — so that people would believe. It’s only at the end that I managed to work out who all the naked French people were (and that it was based on a real-life photograph). Picasso’s in there somewhere! Most of all, they are survivors, and also mourners — having lost friends and loved ones during the Paris occupation.
Bubbling underneath is a sub-plot about the way women are perceived, by age and attractiveness (viz Beaton’s acidic snark about no older models please), and how women in World War Two shifted that perception for a time. Lee’s photographs of women at work — in uniform and gas masks — have such depth of meaning. Opposed against this is the mistreatment and punishment of women (often by other denouncing women) who were shamed as collaborators, or by soldiers who saw all women as available or easy (post — reconquered Paris, or never discussed at all, Russia). Miller too is prepared to use and change her image to adapt to the times, morphing from archetypal ‘40’s glamour to a soldier’s disguise, from model to creator. We also see how difficult it was to be a capable woman in a world where you weren’t expected to be — she carries a penknife — with good reason. And yet after the War wondering what and who she was — what it was all for — disappearing into housewifery, implied addictions and obscurity.
Josh O’Connor is a delight as the interviewer who keeps asking quizzical and increasingly personal questions of Lee Miller — and her intentions. Equally it’s about Roland who could admire Lee as both artist and woman, or David Sherman who saw Lee as a comrade and friend, stood alongside her as they headed out together to capture history.
Kate Winslet plays a great part, unveiling the depth of the character she’s playing like shedding petals, over time. All the while, compulsively smoking…I longed for more of the actual images and process of image creation (as in Civil War) — there was a short montage at the end indicating how the images had been used and woven within the film. Not to mention poetry being dropped by the British over Paris!
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