LEE**

Lee Miller was a supermodel and a surrealist muse before becoming a photographer in her own right.  When World War Two broke out began by photographing the home front for Vogue before lobbying to be sent to the front line. She captured images of the Allies using napalm in France, and then of the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau. Famously, she photographed herself in Hitler's bathtub, her muddied boots defiant in front of the tub.  She was tough, self-medicated with alcohol, "sex positive", and by all accounts a rather distant mother.  Her life is big enough for several films, or a miniseries. Sadly this film, produced by and starring Kate Winslet, can't seem to wrap its arms around its subject and wrestle it to the ground.

The first problem with LEE the film is its framing device. Winslet is aged up to be the seventy-year old Lee going through her old photos with a young interviewer (CHALLENGERS' Josh O'Connor).  The problem is that every time we get to a moment of dramatic tension and need to stay emotionally engaged we are ripped out into a different era.  The worst example of this is when we go from Dachau to Hitler's villa, now being used as a convivial officers' mess.  The contrast is sinister and surreal and Alexandre Desplat's score captures the weirdness of it. The problem is, the contrast is split by an interlude in the 1970s. I understand why Winslet the producer thought she had a duty to include this framing device - more of which in the spoiler section after the release info - but I think it was a distraction ad a mis-step.

The second problem with LEE is that the first act in St Malo is marred by the casting choice of Alexander Skarsgard as her lover Roger Penrose. Skarsgard simply can't do a convincing English accent and it's hugely distracting.  

The film is on firmer footing with the third and most impactful relationship that Miller had - her collaboration with the Life magazine photographer David Scherman. Andy Samberg is good in this role as far as it goes but the film isn't interested in exploring why this relationship worked when so many others didn't. And it criminally under explores his reaction to the camps. 

We are on firmer footing with Lee's female friendships.  Winslet is at her finest in scenes of tender intimacy, first with Noemie Merlant's surrealist artist Nusch - and most heartbreakingly with Marion Cotillard's Solange d'Ayen. This is not a convincing film but Cotillard's cameo is pure authentic tragic pain and deserves awards season recognition.  I also loved Andrea Riseborough (BRIGHTON ROCK) as the thoroughly decent and thoroughly straight-laced Vogue editor Audrey Withers.

The problem is that these moments of genuine heartbreak are scattered in a film that can't quite convince as a whole. I blame this mostly on the screenplay by Liz Hannah (THE POST), Marion Hume and John Collee (MASTER & COMMANDER).  I think the time spent in St Malo is good as a contrast to the wartime suffering, but I felt every moment spent with Roger or the interviewer was wasted. Most of all I just didn't feel that I ended the film understanding Lee more than at the start. The script felt reductive. Its Lee is a victim of abuse who protects the abused but cannot protect herself or her family from her alcoholism.  But is that the only explanation I am to have of why this beautiful privileged woman decided to go to Dachau? And was she an alcoholic before the war? Or just after Dachau?  And why don't we ever really see her suffer for that?  She is the most high-functioning alcoholic I have seen.

I also feel that the film is both dumbed down with exposition AND weirdly does not explain stuff I needed to know! There's lots of exposition - especially early on - but then no signposting that we are at Dachau, or really that we are in Hitler's actual house, or that the little girl in the camp was in a brothel. I only knew that because Kate Winslet referred to that scene in a Q&A. 

Is the film worth watching? Yes for the scenes with Riseborough and Cotillard and for Winslet's performance. But it remains a frustrating viewing experience.

LEE is rated R and has a running time of 116 minutes.  It played Toronto 2023. It opens in the UK on September 16th and in the USA on September 27th.

Spoilers follow:  Kate Winslet said in her Q&A that she felt a duty toward Lee's son to give him the conversation with his mother about her life that he never had in real life. This film was made in collaboration with the son and the Lee Miller estate. I feel that that sense of obligation was a burden for this film.  The lack of relationship between mother and son is only interesting if we really explore her post-war PTSD and as a reflection on what she saw. By wrapping the film up in it, and making it have a conversation with Lee's wartime experiences, it diminishes the power of the Holocaust scenes and adds little depth to our understanding of Lee.

TAR*****

TAR is the obverse of SHE SAID: it is a film that has no interest in the alleged victims of sexual harassment or in those that seek to expose it.  Where SHE SAID denies the aggressor screen time and has no interest in his motivations, TAR puts the accused in every frame.  TAR is unabashedly interested in genius and the way in which it goes hand in hand with narcissism and the structures that enable that power to be abused.  TAR is a film that dares to be sophisticated and nuanced and provocative:  SHE SAID plays like a TV movie of the month with a pantomime villain and unequivocal heroines.  Maybe that’s the correct approach in the latter film because it deals with the real-life heinous crimes of Harvey Weinstein and the brave women who came forward and took him down. But it makes for a far less interesting film, sad to say.  Maybe TAR, creating a fictional and more ambitious story of abuse, can allow itself to be more slippery, and is therefore more fascinating and compelling.

The film stars Cate Blanchett in the performance of a lifetime of incredible performances. She plays the self-created worldwide star conductor Lydia Tar, currently in residence as the Berlin Phil and about to record the seminal Mahler 5.  She is leonine and masterful and imperious: striding on the world stage in her power suits.  When we meet her she is on stage being interviewed by real-life New Yorker editor Adam Gopnik, being feted for her skill. We see her artfully create the apparently artless cover art for her new recording.  She lives in luxury with her partner and adopted daughter. Her life seems infinitely curated to beauty and brilliance.

On the peripheral vision of our screen experience the cracks start to show.  Tar’s assistant and aspiring conductor (PARIS 13TH DISTRICT’s Noemie Merlant) reads emails sent from a frantic young woman - another aspiring conductor - who claims Tar tried to seduce her and then blocked her career. Who is the aggressor here? Tar claims the woman is a stalker and dismisses the messages so quickly you can almost forget they occurred, and get taken up again in the juggernaut of Tar’s professional ambition.

But then, later in the film, we see Tar cultivate a young cellist and deliberately bulldoze convention to create an amazing career opportunity for her.  Is this favouritism, sexual grooming, or just aggressive meritocracy and the bestowing of favour on an admittedly great talent? We are in ambiguity although for those who want to see it, patterns might be condemnatory.  When Tar dismisses an ageing, fading, deputy conductor, he tells her everyone knows what she does, and social media seems to confirm it.

The final act fall from grace is swift and merciless and perhaps deserved. The beauty of the film is that while we can see Tar’s flaws we also inwardly cheer at some of her politically incorrect victories.  When she censoriously destroys a young conservatoire student who casually dismisses Bach as a misogynist, viewers of my generation and mindset cheer for a champion of the dead white male Canon and not imposing anachronistic demands of their regressive values. Similarly, what parent doesn’t wish she could scare the shit out of a schoolyard bully?  

Yes, reader, I must admit that I am indeed Team Tar and to see her, a woman who controlled time, reduced to conducting against a time-track, was rather depressing to me. The triumph of mediocrity and the cancelling and constraining of genius. This is, I think rather the point of the film.  That of course one must punish abuse, but is cancelling really justice?  Should we not prosecute according to law and not on social media?  Tar was certainly guilty of being an egomania. What great conductor isn’t? But is she guilty of harassment as charged?  We will never know.

TAR is rated R and has a running time of 158 minutes. It played Venice, Telluride and Toronto 2022. It was released in the USA last month and goes on release in the UK on January 20th.

PARIS 13TH DISTRICT***** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 10

Jacques Audiard (UN PROPHET) returns to our screens with a beautifully rendered examination of modern relationships, based on Adrian Tomine's graphic novel.  The film focuses on three friends and how their love lives intersect and lead them to greater emotional understanding. The first is the Emilie, played by the charismatic breakout star, Lucie Zhang. As the film opens, Lucie is living in her grandma's apartment and leading a sex positive life. She seems carefree, strong and great fun. But as the film develops we realise that she is struggling with familial pressure to live up to her great academic career and is working a series of dead-end jobs. We also discover that despite her predilection for online hook-ups, what she really wants is a committed loving relationship with her former room-mate, Camille (Makita Samba).  Camille is also a bit mixed up, a wannabe PHD student who ends up running his friend's failing estate agent. At first he rejects the idea of dating Lucie and runs the gamut of various colleagues before discovering where he truly wants to be in life. These colleagues include Nora (Noemie Merlant - PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE). It's this final story that I found the most fascinating and daring. Nora starts off as a naive provincial mature student who ends up in Paris to restart her education. But one night she goes to a student party in a blonde wig and is mistaken for a sexcam worker called Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth). The students bully her, she drops out, and ends up working with Camille. But as she struggles to deal with what happened to her, she makes contact with Amber and begins a friendship that is both deeply touching and surprising in its outcome. 

PARIS 13th DISTRICT shows us how to portray relationships that are complicated and honest and evolve. I loved how Audiard - in contrast to Eva Husson in MOTHERING SUNDAY - used nudity and explicit sex scenes to propel character and evolve story.  Nothing here is gratuitous. Everything is honest. I felt as though I really knew all three lead characters - their flaws and their charms - and was utterly involved in how their stories would turn out. Meaningful revelations are dropped in with a very light touch - a half-heard phone-call or a camera glancing at pictures on a wall. I also absolutely loved Paul Guilhaume's stunning black and white photography that renders modernist and brutalist architecture as a stunningly vital and beautiful backdrop that made me hanker for city-life again after my Pandemic-driven suburban isolation. And Rone's electronic, award-winning sound-track is spectacular. 

Overall, this is a film that pulses with vibrant real life. It makes you hanker for cities and people and serendipitous meetings that can be life changing. This is film-making at its most glorious and vital.

PARIS 13TH DISTRICT aka LES OLYMPIADES  has a running time of 105 minutes. It played Cannes where it won Best Soundtrack. It will be released in France on November 3rd but does not yet have a commercial release date for the USA or UK.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Day Seven

Writer-director Céline Sciamma has been creating beautifully acted, intimate portraits of female friendships since WATERLILIES, which was also the first movie in which I saw, and was impressed by, Adele Haenel. In her latest film she gives us another film by women, about women.  Set in the 18th century, it stars Noemie Merlant as a portrait painter called Marianne, commissioned by a Countess (Valeria Golino) to capture the likeness of her daughter Heloise (Adele Haenel). The only problem is that the likeness must be captured in secret: Heloise doesn't want her portrait to be painted as it will be sent to her future husband in Milan.  So the two women start to go for walks, and over the first hour of the film form an uneasy friendship.  It's only when the Countess leaves for five days in the second hour of the film that their closeness can be expressed as love.  But this is not just the story of a life-defining week of love. Huge kudos also to Luàna Bajrami playing the servant girl Sophie, trying to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy using old wives' herbal remedies and finally a backstreet abortion.

This is a film with very little interest in men. Apart from a sailor or servant at the start and end of the film, they rarely feature.  Rather this is a film about the impact that men have on women, and the spaces they try to create for themselves to provide support, friendship and love. The Countess is imprisoned in a deserted manor house, desperate to return to her beloved Milan.  Heloise is being forced into an arranged marriage. Marianne cannot fulfil her promise as a painter because the Academy won't allow her to paint male nudes and so learn anatomy, or submit pictures in her own name. And Sophie has to take increasingly desperate steps to not fall victim of her own biology.

As a result, the hinge of the film is a deeply evocative scene half way through the movie, where our three heroines go to a kind of women's meeting on a heath. As they sing and dance around a fire at night, it almost feels like a kind of witches coven - but in the best kind of way. It's a place where women can bond, have fun, let loose, express emotions they had kept suppressed, and seek. The result in a deliberately paced, evocative, intimate film about women viewing women, loving them, supporting them, and daring to snatch moments of happiness within the constraints of the patriarchy.  

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE has a running time of 119 minutes. It played Cannes where it won the Queer Palm and Best Screenplay.  It also played Telluride, Toronto and London. It opens in the USA on December 6th. It does not yet have a commercial release date in the UK.