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Lee (2023 movie)

comaweng


Someone who liked to take photographs lived during the time of the Second World War and therefore harnessed opportunities to combine those two things and take photographs… of the atrocities of the Second World War. Elizabeth Miller, or Lee Miller (Kate Winslet), as she liked to call herself (1907-1977), studied in Paris for a year in 1925 before (to cut a long story short) flitting about, largely between Paris and New York, with a spell in Cairo, and was living in Hampstead with Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård) at the time of the Blitz. As the film concerns itself with the ongoing British obsession with World War Two, that they got married after the war, in 1947, is neither here nor there, and neither is Penrose being knighted for services to the visual arts in 1966, effectively giving Lee Miller the title Lady Penrose.

 

There is a decent plot twist in the final moments of the film, which ensures a sufficiently poignant ending to proceedings, as Roland and Lee’s son Antony (Josh O’Connor) surveys the magnitude and significance of Lee Miller’s photography. Before that, however, Miller began with the sort of farty arty absurdist pretentiousness that wouldn’t be out of place in Tate Modern these days, and at the first opportunity, once the portrayal of soldier patients in a war hospital, bombed out buildings and civilians just doing their best to keep their heads down and get on with things, she returns to these principles, stripping off in the bathroom of one of the homes of Adolf Hitler and having a photo taken in the Führer’s bathtub.

 

Otherwise, much of the war coverage is rather predictable, and the whole thing about women not being allowed in certain places was a point made too many times. Elsewhere, Miller’s fluency in French comes in handy when some GI Joe or other wants to know why a Frenchwoman is beyond livid at the apparent actions of another Frenchwoman. In different situations, she defends other women, even fending off a soldier from assaulting a woman in broad daylight. As a portrayal of a series of events, the movie works well. But I don’t think I really knew much about Miller by the end, beyond a rather bolshy woman who is pleased when she gets what she wants but is prone to vicious fits of rage when she doesn’t.

 

This left me feeling that I was introduced to someone quite vain-glorious, and ultimately thoroughly dislikeable – working for the London office of Vogue magazine, she arrogantly assumed that her photographs would be published in whatever issue of the magazine it was supposedly meant to be published in, blasting her anger in every direction when it transpires they’re not there. I mean, seriously: photos of mutilated corpses in Vogue? Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough), editor of British Vogue from 1940 to 1960, had, Miller unilaterally decided, not done enough to make Vogue all about Lee Miller and absolutely nobody else, and was therefore a complete waste of time, space and oxygen. That Withers had sent the images to American Vogue, who did print them, didn’t matter: Miller thought she had the right to have absolutely everything done in the precise manner in which she wanted them. Well, life ain’t fair, and I suppose the film did well to present Miller as a diva with a capital D. If you want a Wikipedia page of someone’s life in film format, this is it.

 

Two stars

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(C) Copyright 2016-2023 Chris Omaweng. All rights reserved.

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