Ellen Kuras’ feature film isn’t about Lee Miller, in demand model and muse – LEE is about her iconic images of war: the London air raid wardens with their surrealist gas masks, the silk stockings hanging to dry in the window of a barrack for British female soldiers, the soldier Kurt, completely bandaged in white except for his eyes - "beautiful eyes" says Lee (Kate Winslet) - in a military hospital in Normandy. The screenplay follows Miller’s breathless campaign across Europe, her mission equally fueled by hatred, contempt, ambition, and empathy: to show the world what it is with her Rolleiflex.

This film that keeps us at a distance in the cinema is precise and discreet. Just like the photographer focuses on the image of her object in the camera, not the object itself, we too see a scene (precisely recreated based on a photo) not as real, but as a collage of photographs as they appeared in Vogue and the images staged for the film. Out of respect for the victims, this is how events are told: when Miller climbs up the wagon that was standing in front the Dachau concentration camp for days, with hundreds of dead people who starved and died of thirst, we in the cinema are left out. The horror in the face of the corpses is silent, best reflected in Winslet's face, which is frozen as if to ward off evil.

In such moments, the actress is fantastic, also when she’s allowed to be gruff, laconic, or flirty and hard-drinking. However, her fear of revealing her compassion is not so easy for her. But in this she is like Lee Miller, who after the war, when everything was over and yet nothing was over - because the images remained in her mind - had a serious nervous breakdown. And she never talked about this period. The interview with her son, which frames the film, never existed. And she packed away the photos.

Elisabeth Bauschmid (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy