Iconoclastic, restless, constantly torn between the desire for freedom and the burden of testimony, Lee Miller Penrose traversed the twentieth century like a lucid shadow, penetrating history with her lens and returning it in images that defy time. Born in a still Victorian America but destined to dissolve every constraint imposed on women, her existential trajectory unfolds between surrealism, fashion, and the horrors of war, leaving an indelible mark on photography and collective memory.

From her debut as a model, an emblem of an icy and impenetrable beauty, to the discovery of photography as a tool of creation and truth, Miller refuses to be a passive muse and becomes the architect of her own gaze. Alongside Man Ray, she absorbs and reinterprets his experiments, fueling an aesthetic that challenges visual conventions. Her adherence to surrealism is not mere style but an ontological stance: for Miller, reality must be dissected, deconstructed, and recomposed into forms that reveal what the surface conceals. Her art is always an act of revelation.

But if surrealism teaches her to look beyond appearances, war radicalizes her gaze. Distanced from artistic circles, she immerses herself in the chaos of the world, becoming a witness to a reality that can no longer be transfigured: conflict leads her to places where humanity has been annihilated, and she returns images that offer no escape. The liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald, the devastation of European cities, the post-war desolation—each shot is a wound imprinted on paper, a vision that allows no fiction. The famous portrait in Hitler’s bathtub becomes the epitome of her journey: a woman immersed in a place that belongs to absolute evil, yet she transforms it into an ironic and disturbing scene, overturning power with a gesture of inexorable lucidity.

The biopic that attempts to capture her genius and complexity, however, clashes with the limits of an overly codified narrative. Despite Kate Winslet’s committed performance, which conveys the strength and contradictions of the photographer, the film often slips into conventionality, relying on visual and dramaturgical solutions seemingly designed for an audience more inclined toward celebration than investigation. The construction of flashbacks, the chromatic contrast between bohemian life and the horrors of war, the didactic nature of certain dialogues betray an excessive simplification of a figure who thrived on ambiguity and contradictions.

On one hand, the film, at times, evokes the power of Miller’s images; on the other, it seems to dilute her complexity, reducing her to a personal journey of emancipation rather than conveying her profound restlessness. The screenplay often retraces well-known milestones without capturing the creative tension that defined her life. Her relationship with Man Ray is treated superficially, failing to explore the dialectic of influences and conflicts that made it a crucial node in her artistic development. Even her post-war trauma, essential to understanding her gradual distancing from photography, is mentioned but never truly explored, leaving the impression of an incomplete portrait.

Visually, the film oscillates between moments of great suggestion and an overly polished aesthetic that dampens the urgency of the narrative. The warm, enveloping tones of the first part give way to a representation of war where drama becomes almost aestheticized, depriving some sequences of their necessary brutality. The use of photography within the story is interesting but not always effective: while it allows us to see the process behind some iconic images, it also risks turning the protagonist into a naive spectator of her own shots, betraying the profoundly active nature of her gaze.

The film does not always grasp this dimension, leaving the suspicion that it preferred to make her more accessible, more easily understandable, at the expense of her true essence. However, the figure of Lee Miller endures. Even when the narrative reduces her, her gaze continues to question us—irreducible and necessary—in its being both fragment and totality, artist and witness, myth and unresolved enigma.

An unresolved childhood trauma, suffocated in the silence imposed by her mother, becomes the detonator of an expressive need that finds its privileged language in photography. The photographic image is not just a document or certification of a buried past but an act of revelation, a reclaiming of memory, an existential testimony.

In cinematic language, this dynamic translates into a tension between the visible and the invisible, between what the lens frames and what remains at the margins, between the truth fixed in an instant and what remains repressed—eluding time and the capture of reality’s elusive essence. Photography, in this sense, is not merely a trace of the past but a narrative device that constructs a complex dialogue between the subject and their own history. Trauma thus becomes the driving force of an incessant inquiry, an obsession with recording reality that ultimately reveals more than one would wish to hide.

It is baffling how, with such an extraordinary true story and an outstanding cast, a mediocre, banal film lacking the depth promised by its source material was created. The result is a work aligned with the most pop and mainstream television, flattening the complexity of the story into a conventional narrative devoid of bite and authentic stylistic research.

Even the staging seems to cater more to the needs of a reassuring and easily digestible story for the general public rather than a desire to challenge the viewer, to confront them with ambiguity and shadows. The result is a work that, despite starting from a powerful narrative core, disperses into a presentation devoid of personality, incapable of leaving a lasting mark on the viewer’s memory.

06-Mar-2025 by Beatrice