Film: Lee Miller biopic: The Woman in Hitler’s Bathtub

One of her most impressive images is not necessarily one in which the object and what is to be shown are immediately apparent. You see a plate with a mountain of meat on it, next to a napkin, a knife and a fork. The mountain of flesh is, as you only find out from the title, an amputated breast of a friend. Photographer Lee Miller secretly had the body part taken from the hospital. For the year 1929, and probably even today, an impertinence. Can you show that? If you want to accuse the objectification of the female body, then: sure.

Lee Miller, born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York, never cared about conventions. She drinks, drinks, parties, sleeps with whoever she wants and is also incredibly funny. Unheard of for a woman. She’s like a man, only more beautiful.

Miller became famous, as befits a woman, not through her technically perfect work as a fashion, portrait and war photographer, but through a picture of her in Hitler’s bathtub. And that is probably the biggest problem with the biographical film “The Photographer”, produced by Kate Winslet, who also plays the leading role.

“I beg you to believe that this is the truth.”

Lee Miller to her editor Audrey Withers

While Miller’s artistic work began 20 years before this famous bathtub shot, Winslet, who spent eight years working on Miller’s biography, and director Ellen Kuras, who makes her debut here and is otherwise known as a cinematographer, concentrate very much on the conventional . Almost dutifully, they work their way through Miller’s biography from the 1940s onwards, briefly touching on her rather dissolute life in France, and then rushing straight into the middle of her life’s work: war photography.

Miller documents the “Blitz,” the German Luftwaffe’s attack on London between 1940 and 1941, quite cautiously. But then she decides to go to where the horrors can be seen most clearly: to the front. She takes photos in the French port city of Saint Malo, where the Wehrmacht was supposed to have already surrendered. Instead, Miller finds himself in the middle of a contested battlefield, documenting the use of napalm. All of this is shown in common images from every well-funded war film (and accompanied by way too pathetic music: Alexandre Desplat). A few of the photos that were taken during this time are recreated on film; you briefly see the amputation of a leg in the hospital, but not too much, otherwise you would feel sick.

Next biographical station: Hitler’s bathtub. On their journey east along the theaters of war, Miller, along with her photographer colleague and friend David E. Scherman, ended up in the quarters of an Allied command post at Prinzregentenplatz 16, Hitler’s private apartment in Munich. She takes off her clothes, puts her dirty boots – smeared with the dirt from the Dachau floor – in front of the bathtub, drapes a picture of Hitler on the edge of the bathtub and lets Scherman take her picture. An expression of her humor, an appropriation of her disbelief at what she had seen of the war so far. Miller made this picture famous; Scherman was awarded.

Kuras films all the suffering that Miller has depicted with her images up to this point in a disciplined and strictly conventional way. Only, and the film has already run for over an hour, when Miller and Scherman set off in a jeep to the concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald, does the film become anything like truthful. The two were among the first to capture the extent of the Holocaust in pictures. Even Allied soldiers do not believe that the Shoah really happened and, even though they saw it with their own eyes, consider the mass murder of millions of people to be a set-up. What they see seems to them to be beyond anything that humans are capable of. Lee Miller therefore telegraphs her editor Audrey Withers at Vogue, for whom she provides a large part of her photo reports: “I beg you to believe that this is the truth.” Such a banal sentence, but it has to be said and he also appears in the film. As we look at the pictures of the corpses on the deportation trains, a German woman plays unselfconsciously with her little son next to the tracks. One inevitably has to think of “Zone of Interest”. And unfortunately these are the strongest scenes in the film.

None of the pictures from this time make it into “Vogue”, which has distinguished itself as an unusual chronicler of the war period because the population does not want to be exposed to these photos in the post-war era and instead hopes for distraction through the economic miracle. This is pure politics, against which “Vogue” cannot or does not want to assert itself and which Miller, as an artist, is powerless to deal with.

Miller later becomes depressed and addicted to alcohol and pills because of her war experiences. This is mentioned in passing in the film. The fact that she could hardly work anymore and no longer wanted anything to do with professional photography and preferred to devote herself to cooking, there is no longer any room for in a biopic that squeezes a highly strange, changeable and passionately self-determined life into a blockbuster format wants. That Kate Winslet, an intelligent and reflective woman who studied the material for almost ten years and worked closely with Miller’s son Antony Penrose, who manages his mother’s estate, failed to make more of this life than Hitler’s Filming the bathtub picture is and remains a mystery of production circumstances.

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It is also somewhat astonishing that in a film that is called, at least in German, “The Photographer” and is about the biography of one of the most important war photographers in the world, there is no important sentence about the role of photography beyond the platitude about showing truth is disappointing. In the course of what is shown, many questions arise, such as whether the suicide of a Nazi family needs to be subsequently aestheticized by depicting it? Where is the artistic boundary between enlightenment and transfiguration? The film doesn’t have to give answers to that, but to completely slide past a position that simply shows how these photos were taken is sobering.

So “The Photographer” never really gets close to Lee Miller. Over 120 minutes you see a straightforward, exciting life that wants to present itself as an empowering feminist manifesto, but misses the actual core, a character study by the artist Lee Miller.

“The Photographer”: Great Britain, USA, Norway and others 2023. Director: Ellen Kuras. Starring: Kate Winslet, Andy Samberg, Josh O’Connor, Alexander Skarsgård. 116 minutes, start: September 19th.

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