Warning: this article may contain spoilers for Kate Winslet's new film, Lee.
Kate Winslet's next role as model-turned-war-photographer Lee Miller is not to be missed. While the biopic follows Lee's real-life experiences photographing key moments of World War Two for Vogue, it's much, much more than a war film.
It's a feminist account of an important voice in history, navigating the realities of violence against women at that time, portraying nude scenes through a female gaze and most crucially, made by women who want to empower others. Directed by first-time director and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind cinematographer Ellen Kuras and based on The Lives of Lee Miller, written by Lee's son Antony Penrose, Lee is an authentic portrayal of an extraordinary woman's life.
Kate wanted to flip the narrative around Lee's life – who has been known predominantly for her time as a male photographer's “muse” in her 20s – wanting to shine a light on the amazing, important work she did as a war correspondent, against all patriarchal odds.
“If you were to Google her nine years ago, perhaps even before the film, what would come up was that she was the former muse of Man Ray, a surrealist artist and photographer," Kate has said in an interview. “She absolutely hated being a model. It wasn't something that made her comfortable, and she famously said, ‘I'd rather take a photograph than be one.’”
Lee's career as a model came to an end shortly after she made history as the first woman to put her face on an advertisement for women's menstrual products. What a woman. She eventually decided to fight her way to the WW2 frontlines as a photographer – and Lee covers this extraordinary time in her life, as well as the unimaginable trauma of witnessing a war and what it meant to be a woman navigating it. It boasts an amazing cast, including Marion Cotillard, Alexander Skarsgård, Andrea Riseborough, Josh O’Connor and Andy Samberg.
Alongside Kate's absolutely incredible performance, Andy needs a special mention for his stand-out role as David Scherman, Lee's friend and wartime reporting collaborator. Though we may know Andy for his comedic timing, he shoulders David's story absolutely beautifully – with moments of welcome deadpan humour that we're sure he couldn't have resisted.
Lee and David's steadfast bond is perfectly portrayed in the film, culminating in Lee bathing in Hitler's bath tub in Munich when they visit his apartment together, and David confiding to her the devastating impact he'd felt from seeing the devastation at the concentration camps. You'll know the moment when you see it – Kate herself has described how hard Andy found the scenes himself, as a Jewish man – and you can feel the raw emotion and truth that he brings to the role and the story.
It's a masterpiece of a film – here are GLAMOUR's top 7 ways that Lee establishes itself as more than a war story, and a feminist take on history.
We watch Lee's initial struggle to be accepted as a war correspondent, a space that was – as so many were at that time – completely male dominated. Even when she arrived, she is soon told that no women were allowed in press briefings, a warning she promptly ignored.
Of course, her work achieved acclaim for its merciless and authentic take on the realities of war – everyday and otherwise. Early on in the film, she takes a picture of a female military officer's underwear hanging in her window, a demonstration of daily life at war.
“Only a woman could've taken these photos,” Lee's Vogue editor Audrey Withers (played by Andrea Riseborough) argued when her male counterpart tried to stop Lee's photos from being published. And she was right. The film makes a constant case for the importance of different voices telling important stories – and the ways that women were, and continue to be, stopped from doing so.
Although there were still certainly parts of wartime life that women were kept out of, Lee also demonstrates the ways in which women stepped up during the war, taking over men's jobs and shifting the script on what post-war world would look like, seeing as many women did not want to go back to a solely domestic life.
Before leaving for France, Lee is keen to document the ways in which women stepped into the workforce, and documents women's efforts on the frontlines (including flying bomber planes) when she arrives as a correspondent.
Alongside the horrors of combat, Lee doesn't shy away from the reality of violence against women and girls during wartime. Lee discovers a woman being raped by an American soldier on the streets of Paris, and fights to stop him, giving the woman her knife telling her to “chop it off” if she is attacked again.
We also see the relentless cruelty of war play out against a French woman who is manipulated by a German solider into giving information. She tells Lee that the solider told her that he loved her, and seems devastated by her mistake. But others are cruel in their response, with male soldiers being dismissive of her plight, and an angry mob eventually shaving her head in the street as punishment. It depicts a harsh reality of the violence women faced, even if they weren't on the battlefield themselves.
Kate's and director Ellen Kuras' sole mission was lifting Lee “out of the male gaze”, particularly when it came to filming nude scenes.
Both women have spoken about the importance of Lee not being sexualised or objectified, with Kate refusing to sit differently to hide “belly rolls” while wearing a bikini, and when it came to that scene of her bathing in Hitler's bathtub, it was crucial to Kate that “at no point in our story could we allow for her to be naked on anyone else's terms but her own”, stressing the importance of a middle-aged woman feeling free with herself.
It took almost a decade to bring Lee's story to the screen, due to Kate's commitment to bringing the nuances and realities of the photographer's complicated life to the screen, as well as actor strikes, Covid-related breaks and struggles to secure funding.
At one rather dire stage in the production process, Kate paid the Lee crew's salary for two weeks in order to keep things going. This commitment to bringing Lee's life to screen shows the incredible hard work and sacrifice that went into championing a woman's story.
The production notes for the film read: “there was no question that it would be a woman who would direct this film”. There were many reasons for this, not least because many potential (often male) investors had asked why a woman like Lee was likeable, and why the film needed to be made – proving with their ignorance exactly why it needed to be made. A woman needed to tell this story.
Kate hired Ellen Kuras, a cinematographer, to make her directorial debut – another example of this film creating opportunities for women to tell stories.
On Elizabeth Day's How To Fail podcast, Kate also opened up about her own reservations about directing herself, or even leading a film in that way, but how her experiences making Lee made her realise how she needed to lead in order to “change the culture” of male-dominated Hollywood.
“The more I’m not doing it, now with the need to change the culture, the more I feel like I’m actually letting down other women by not doing it,” she said.
Throughout the film, Kate portrays Lee as passionately committed to telling stories of the war and other women's lives. Her motivation to do so is intrinsically linked, we discover, to Lee's own abuse she faced as a child. She was shamed at a young age and unable to speak out about her own story, so felt compelled to speak out for others.
If that's not a feminist championing of those who need a voice, we don't know what is.
