Lee (2023) - A splendid portrait of the woman in Hitler’s bathtub

                                                                                                        Credit: allocine.fr

The list of films based on women plucked out of obscurity is infinite, such important stories from the Radium Girls who exposed its dangers and advocated for safer working conditions through to the aptly named Hidden Figures Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, the three African American mathematicians at NASA who played a vital role in the success of early space missions. Did Lee Miller need to be plucked out of obscurity? Much like Van Gogh or Kafka, her photographs were only brought to public attention by her son’s discovery and promotion of them after her death. But considering her exceptional personal life and career, it is also a wonder that it is only now a film has been released – and what a film it is.

Kate Winslet is transfixing as Miller from her days basking in the French sun with friends Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cotillard) and Paul and Nusch Eluard (Vincent Colombe and Noémie Merlant) through to her enlistment as a war photographer for Vogue (of which d’Ayen was the French editor), much to the discontent of her new husband Roland (Alexander Skarsgård with a strange accent). Feeling useless after war breaks out in Europe, Miller takes advantage of her American citizenship to travel to the continent, which was at the time prohibited for women. But Miller is unwilling to take no from an answer, especially from a colonel who bans her from entering a press meeting on the front. There, she is faced with the inhuman truths of war, from the wounded soldiers ailing in makeshift hospitals through to, in one of the film’s most shocking turns, the remains of the concentration camps. Miller is devoted, to her art and to the truth through her art – she captures everything on camera, either in organised fashion (meticulously placing one of her subjects against a doorframe) or in chaos (whilst under fire). Paweł Edelman’s cinematography is as studied as Lee’s – like a photographer’s work, it picks and chooses what we are able to see and what is hidden from sight, at moments providing us with a mere glimpse of the subject through Lee’s camera, so much so that we tilt our heads, hoping to catch just a little bit more of what she has seen. At other points however, it violently affronts us with reality – but never so much so that it feels cheap.

Liz Hannah, John Collee, and Marion Hume’s script is also striking in its capacity to weave comedy into the darkest of times – perhaps it is simply because Miller is American and so strikingly matter-of-fact, but Lee also finds its strength in the simple notion that, whatever is happening, life goes on, and it must do so with lightness. A particularly interesting sequence featuring Audrey Withers (an excellent performance from Andrea Riseborough), the editor of British Vogue, chirpily explaining why the office is on fire, for instance, is so amusing that there is no time to stop and think about how extraordinary it really is. Miller, also, takes no time to think it through – she has found a good setting for a photograph to highlight female labour during the war.

But of course, Lee also stresses the limits of photography and the question of consent – she photographs people when they ask her, she asks others if they can be photographed. And then, sometimes, she doesn’t. Photographing a small girl in one of the concentration camps she visited, a small girl traumatised and stunned by the camera, an emotion washes across Miller’s face – is it doubt? Regret? Might it even be remorse? This is the only time at which Miller ever seems to recognise the power her camera has to cause discomfort. She was dedicated to her art and to showing the truth, always the truth – even if it meant that sometimes, others had to pay a price. The question, then, that Lee poses, from her conversations with Josh O’Connor’s prying journalist through to the iconic bathtub picture, captured by Lee’s loyal friend David Scherman (Andy Samberg in an understated dramatic role), is how far are you willing to go for your art? Considering David’s nervous expression as Lee hastily organised the Fuhrer’s bathroom with a cohort of armed men waiting outside, not many were willing to go as far as her.