Lee

Lee Miller was real: first a model for Vogue, then a surrealist photographer working with Man Ray, then a correspondent at the front in the Second World War. The film covers the stretch from her late thirties to the end of the war. She starts working for British Vogue, whose editor Audrey Withers sends her to the front. She photographs the Blitz in London, the liberation of Paris, and finally the camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. The image at its centre is a real photograph: Miller enters Hitler's flat in Munich and has her own portrait taken in his bathtub. Her boots are still caked with the mud of Dachau, and that mud is on the edge of the tub. Kate Winslet plays Miller and produced the film, having carried the project for years. Andrea Riseborough plays Withers, Andy Samberg her colleague David Scherman and Alexander Skarsgård her husband Roland Penrose. Ellen Kuras directed, after many years as a cinematographer; this is her first feature. Valuable for anyone interested in war photography and lives drawn from record. The narrative structure is weak: the film is tied to an interview frame, and that frame becomes over-explanatory in the last section.