"Lee" a remarkable portrait of a remarkable woman

Andy Samberg as David E Scherman? Kate Winslet as Lee Miller LEE Photo By Kimberley French

posted by Robin Menken 

 

Lee Miller was a fashion model IT girl before becoming the radical war correspondent whose intimate images of  the siege of St Malo, and the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald have become some of the most famous images of World War ll.

Discovered on the street by Condé Nast, who supposedly stopped her from stepping in front of a speeding car, she first appeared in a drawing by George Lepape on the cover of Vogue on March 15, 1927 and was considered Vogues’ ideal of the "modern girl”. 

 

For the next two years she was was one of New York’s most sought-after models in New York, photographed by Edward Steichen, Arnold Genthe, Nickolas Muray, George Hoyningen-Huene and more.

 

In 1929, Miller traveled to Paris intending to apprentice with the surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. Announcing to a reluctant Ray "I'm your new student" she became his photographic partner, lover and muse.

She and Ray accidentally re- discovered solarization.

 

While working as a photographer in her own studio in New York she produced surrealistic portraits like the famous Floating Head (Mary Taylor) (1933). She returned to France, met English poet, surrealist painter and art dealer Roland Penrose and vacationed in Mougins, in the south of France, staying for a month with Picasso, Dora Maar, Nusch and Paul Éluard, and other friends. Picasso painted her. (He painted her many times over the years.) One of the paintings is seen in the film.

 

Miller captured the group in a series of informal photographs. Miller’s sensuous photos of the friends are reproduced in the film.

 

Miller moved to Hampstead, London to live with Roland just as the war broke out. Marrying in 1947, they moved to Farley in Sussex in 1949. 

 

Once war was declared, Penrose developed and taught wartime camouflage at the Home Guard training centre in Osterley Park, west London.

 

In 1940 Miller joined British Vogue. New Vogue editor Andrea Riseborough, who became Lee's lifetime friend, wanted to bring the war home, especially Britain's women at war. Miller became their war correspondent capturing compelling shots of life on the British home front: the Blitz, war work by mobilized civilian women: women manning factories;  Women's Land Army (WLA) responsible for British food supplies; Auxiliary Territorial Service officers (ATS) crewing anti-aircraft guns and military police, the National Fire Service, women WRNS doing important Navy work to release men for service at sea; the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) processing and analyzing photographs of enemy targets, as well as maintaining the photography equipment carried on board every RAF bomber. 

 

Britain refused to send women journalists to the theatre of war. Audrey Withers requested permission from the Ministry of Information for Lee to go to the frontline. It was turned down. Lee met, and partnered with, Life magazine photographer David E. Scherman, who suggested she get U.S. War Accreditation and she was off to war. The duo of Scherman and Lee become a relentless team, the first through the door for any 'exclusive'.  They shot Nazi family suicides in Leipzig. 

 

Shown in the film, Lee’s closeup photograph of the Bürgermeister’s daughter, a doll-like girl forced to suicide by her father, is unBearably sad. 

 

Lee and Scherman capture the liberation of Paris, they even snuck into Hitler’s abandoned Munich home — where Scherman captures Miller bathing in the Führer’s tub, shot on the day Hitler suicided in his bunker.

 

Miller was determined to show the world the unbelievable horrors of the War. Despite Withers' intervention British Vogue refused to publish Miller's photographs of corpses in the liberated camps. Eventually US Vogue published them

 

Winslet was attached since 2015. The result is a passion project that helps restore Lee Miller’s complex artistic and journalistic legacy.

 

Tipped by an antique expert, Winslet acquired Lee and Roland Penrose’s historic kitchen table from Farley, which had played host to friends Max Ernst, Noel Coward and Paul Éluard, Man Ray, Max Ernst and Joan Miró among others. They collected art by their guests. Farley House is now a museum, run by Anthony Penrose

 

That history led to Winslet contacted Lee’s son Andrew.

They worked together. More importantly she was given access to Lee’s extraordinary archive, found in Farley’s attic, after her death, by son Andrew.

 

Anthony Penrose had rejected many previous screenplays trading on Lee’s beauty and short changing her intellect, artistry, skill and bravery.

 

Eschewing Millers glamorous pre-war life, Winslet wanted to focus on the war decades when Miller fully expressed her daring and relentless life force, showing  how the horrors of war affected her.

 

The result is a thrilling visceral portrait of Miller's stubborn incursion into 'the heart of darkness'.

 

Winslet attached a powerful crew early in preproduction.

Winslet had worked with cinematographer Ellen Kuras on" Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and invited her to direct Lee—Kuras’s first feature film directing credit.

 

The award-winning team including director of photography Pawel Edelman (The Pianist, Ray), production designer Gemma Jackson (Aladdin, The Gentlemen), costume designer Michael O'Connor (Ammonite, The Duchess), hair and make-up designer Ivana Primorac (The Reader, Darkest Hour, Atonement) and two-time Academy Award-winning composer Alexandre Desplat (The Shape of Water, The Grand Budapest Hotel).

 

After eight years of research, it was Winslet who advised team and cast members, immersing them in Lee’s world, so together, they could create this intimate immersive portrait of Lee Millers remarkable journey to war.

 

Daring to phone composer Alexandre Desplat,  Kuras and Winslet asked him if he would come on board as the film’s composer as Winslet recalls, “ at the end of the call, he said, well, I am so excited to join you. We both burst into tears; we just couldn’t believe he’d said yes.”  

 

Access to the archives give the film Its meticulous verisimilitude.

 

Costume designer Michael O'Connor explains, “We were able to laser-copy the fabrics in order to recreate a lot of Lee’s clothes that Kate wears in the film. This was made possible thanks to the surprise discovery of several boxes at Farley’s labelled “rags” which it turned out were in fact full of Lee Miller’s clothes! 

 

O’Connor was allowed access to Miller’s original army dress uniform and was even allowed to have it copied by tailors on Savile Row, where Lee had her uniform tailored. We even see Lee in the US Army Photographer’s helmet especially designed for use with a camera.

 

Lee Miller was known for her deep dish research, mastering any skill she required. Anthony Penrose describes Winslet as sharing in his mother's obsessive research.

 

Kate studied photography with a Rolleiflex expert so that she could realistically set up and take the photos in the film. Her "prop" Rolleiflex camera was loaded with real film and she shot throughout filming.

 

The opening harrowing sequence of the Siege of St Malo

shows Winslet (who had severely injured her back the day before) running through the streets, sliding and crawling over rubble, dodging bullets, and shooting actual film.

 

The large scale explosions, VFX and squib sequence  lasted two days. Kuras and the crew were astonished by Winslet's commitment. Said Winslet "It forced me to really understand what she was made of."

 

Assigned to cover Civil Affairs for Vogue in what was thought to be the liberated town of St Malo, Lee became the only photo journalist covering the violent battle. Her photos of bombing showed the first use of secret weapon napalm by allied forces at war. The British Ministry of Information and later US army censor's stopped publication.

 

DP Pawel Edelman recreated many of Miller's iconic pictures.

 

The team chose Croatian Trsteno, a beautiful seaside town 20 km north of Dubrovnik, to reproduce the Villa Mougins and the glorious fishing village in the south of France where Lee, Roland Penrose and his surrealists pals laze away a summer before the War.

 

A bookend device shows Lee, now in old age, being  interviewed by a young man. "I don't want this to be a interrogation", he says. "All interviews are interrogation", says Lee. "The good ones".

 

The cast is remarkable. Former SNL sketch comic

Andy Samberg disappears into his role as David Scherman.

 

Samberg admitted to terror at being the “Funny Guy”, but Winslet calmed his fears. Working through the difficult material, the two actors became as bonded as the fearless team they portrayed. Winslet explained,” “he’s been like my Davie - rock-steady… totally committed, a little overwhelmed at times at how hard this subject matter is, but also amazed at how far he can be pushed. I have been so lucky to have shared this experience with him.”

 

Alexander Skarsgård (Diary Of A Teenage Girl) has never been better as Lee's love Roland Penrose. Andrea Riseborough creates the witty, prickly Vogue editor Audrey Withers. Marion Cotillard plays Duchess Solange d'Ayen, first seen in the idyllic pre-war vacation sequences.

 

Solange, a great beauty, was the fashion editor of French Vogue magazine from the 1920s until the 1940s.  She married Jean Maurice Paul Jules de Noailles, the 6th Duke of Ayen.

 

Jean, a wartime member of the French Resistance, was arrested by the Gestapo as a result of an anonymous denunciation, and died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Solange survived Fresnes Prison and a Nazi concentration camp.

 

When Lee enters liberated Paris she visits Solange and Jean d’Ayen’s mansion. The exquisite home is virtually destroyed by Nazi occupation. She sees a broken wraith sweeping the floor. This heart wrenching reconnection of two old friends, anchored by Cotillard’s committed performance, is almost unbearable to watch.

 

Lastly there is Winslet as Lee. It’s a remarkable performance. Indelible, unforgettable, a sort of conjuring, and, I suspect, the performance for which she will always be remembered.

 

Though not shown in the film, when she entered liberated Paris in 1944, Lee tracked down old friends:

shooting Jean Cocteau in the colonnade of the Palais Royal, Cocteau and Jean Marais in their Paris apartment.  novelist Colette in her apartment for a Vogue profile, and Fred Astaire who danced the first show for the American troops in Paris. 

 

Her portraits of art world notables include Picasso, Dora Maar & Jacqueline Roque, Salvador Dali and Gala, Max Ernst, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, Yves Tanguey, Leonora Fini, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Peggy Guggenheim, Christian "Bébé" Bérard (sets and costumes for Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête), Paul and Nusch Éluard, Saul Steinberg, Eileen Agar and Joseph Bard, authors Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, war-correspondents Martha Gellhorn, Margaret Bourke-White and Thérèse Bonney.

 

A MUST SEE.