Is Kate Winslet the finest actress of the post-Meryl Streep generation? In Ellen Kuras’s ‘Lee’, Kate lives every moment of her character’s life. When she eats, she really chews. When she sleeps, she really snores. When she undresses, she really brings her character close to her skin (and there many topless shots of Winslet some in public, where the camera doesn’t life).
When she hurts, boy, does she suffer! Even when the wounds are not invisible. Such is the case with cinematographer-turned-director Ellen Kuras. A must-see, and not only for Winslet’s fans. Recreating the stormy unconventional life of war photographer Lee Miller, this film achieves what Matthew Heineman’s Private War featuring Rosamund Pike as war correspondent Marie Colvin couldn’t inspite of a rousing performance by Rosemund Pike.
In that film Marie Colvin wore a eyepatch over her wounded eye. In Lee, Kate Winslet wears no outward manifestation of her war wounds. Skillfully weaving through Lee Miller’s private and manifested wars, director Ellen Kuras penetrates her protagonist’s life to the point that Lee’s two wars become joined at the hip.
There are masterly montages strewn across the tightly wound film: moments from Lee’s heartstopping journey through World War 2 and Nazi Germany which coil themselves through the vividly narrated truelife account, in serpentine splendour.
Of course Kate Winslet lords over every frame. Someone had once famously commented that Mrs Indira Gandhi wore the pants in her cabinet. The same goes for Winslet, while the men, and sometimes, the women too, acquire the shadowy existence of lives lived by extension.
I especially liked Kate’s fragmented sequences with that fine British actor Josh O’Conner who plays Antony Penrose, a journalist interviewing her as she relives her war experiences in vivid flashbacks. The sudden twist by which Lee Miller becomes bonded to Penrose, was a concession to gimmickry that this quiet resilient muted drama could have done without.
Where this little smouldering gem scores is in yoking Lee’s wartime experience as a woman on the field, with her personal interactions. Especially energizing is Lee’s grief encounter with an old war-ravaged friend in 1944 in Paris. This friend, Solange d’Ayen is so traumatized she hardly recognizes her own past.
Here while two friends were reunited and wept, we get to witness two great actresses Kate Winslet and Marion Cotillard (who plays Solange) sublimating their greatness to their characters’ collective experience.
Lee confronts the ravages of war time with an astonishing absence of chicanery. There is a brutal clarity in the recreation of those hazy smoke-filled siren-blaring times that may be gone with the wind but can come back any time if Donald Trump’s prediction of World War 3 come true.
