A woman in a military helmet wanders through the chaos of war-torn streets. When the explosion throws her against the barricade, time seems to slow down for a moment. From the prologue foreshadowing future events in Lee: The photographer in the front line radiates tension. However, the biographical drama about the real-life war photographer Lee Miller does not always manage to absorb the audience.
The film Lee: Photographer on the Front Line is showing in Czech cinemas from this Thursday. Photo: Kimberley French | Video: Bioscop
The directorial debut of acclaimed cameraman Ellen Kuras is showing in Czech cinemas from Thursday. It tells the most intense chapters of the fate of a woman who lived from 1907 to 1977 and took photos like few others during the Second World War.
The film first shows the former model at the end of the 1930s, when the threat of a global conflict still hangs in the air. Surrounded by friends from artistic circles, including the poet Paul Éluard, she unceremoniously sits down at an outdoor table and undresses. Above all, however, she can perfectly expose others in conversation, especially the art dealer Roland Penrose, her future husband.
Already here, Kate Winslet shines in the central role, when she breaks down the new visitor to the intellectual debate circle to the prime mover in a style that even the master of deduction Sherlock Holmes would not be ashamed of. The forty-nine-year-old Englishwoman, known from the films Titanic and The Reader or the series Mare from Easttown, brings strong emotions to the picture, which otherwise too safely fulfills the conventions of the biographical genre.
The director chose a relatively short episode from the experiences of a remarkable woman who, as a Vogue photographer, among other things, wanted to break down ideas about what belongs on the pages of a fashion magazine during the war. Nevertheless, the film outlines a lot of themes and sticks to a sequence of episodes, only some of which have the appropriate power.
Thanks to her tenacity, determination and luck, the heroine gets to places where, according to the war machine of the time, women were forbidden to enter. And where few people generally got to.
The real photographer Lee Miller lived from 1907 to 1977. | Photo: US Army Center of Military History
The film reconstructs many famous photographs with sensitivity and a precise eye, such as the one from Adolf Hitler’s apartment, where Lee Miller sits naked in a bathtub, on the edge of which a portrait of the German dictator is displayed. But also some others like the picture You Will Not Lunch In Charlotte Street Today showing an empty street, where only a flower pot with a tree and the inscription Police Danger stands in the middle.
Sometimes a little thing is enough, for example, when a photographer notices underwear hanging to dry in a soldier’s quarters, and a supervisor in the Vogue editorial office can then go crazy with the idea that he should print something like that.
In similar moments, the film has strength and you can see the visual taste of the director who was behind the camera for creators like Jim Jarmusch or Michel Gondry. Otherwise, the news relies too much on classic narrative formulas – it is framed by a dialogue with the elderly Lee Miller, whom the young journalist interviews despite her initial displeasure.
Fortunately, Kate Winslet resolutely embodies a woman with a camera who will not let herself be taken away, giving emotional charge even to scenes rustling paper. Or to those who carry the emancipation agenda too eagerly.
The heroine bullies soldiers of various ranks in various situations, at times it almost seems as if the patriarchy is a bigger enemy than the Nazis. Although drawing attention to pointless bureaucratic practices is of course meaningful.
Kate Winslet brings strong emotions to the film about photographer Lee Miller. | Photo: Kimberley French
The film attempts to connect the depiction of this heroine’s period with life and family traumas. However, it falls apart slightly, especially in the second half.
It leaves the viewer with the feeling that it is just a kaleidoscope of fragments from life. He certainly deserves his cinematographic portrait already because Lee Miller is not very well known in our country.
But the characters in supporting roles just flash through the film, whether it’s the Jewish colleague and photographer David E. Sherman or the Parisian friend and journalist Solange d’Ayen.
Some scenes depicting the horrors of concentration camps or transports full of corpses are impressive and at the same time decent, without the camera extortionately grazing on suffering. Others later recall how these atrocities were not known and magazines did not want to print photographs revealing Nazi practices.
But even many of these moments showing how things creaked even on the “correct” side of the ending war, have an instructive character. The heroes speak as if someone had written explanatory sentences in their mouths. And the viewer is moved by the extent to which the sometimes stilted dialogues contrast with what the camera, on the other hand, can narrate in a relatively nuanced way.
Lee: A front-line photographer is the type of image that will only be remembered as a set of photos. In the case of the film, this could perhaps sound like a compliment to the photographer, unfortunately her fate would deserve a slightly more vivid form.
Film
Lee: Frontline photographer
Director: Ellen Kuras
Bioscop, Czech premiere on October 10.