21 Dec Lee (2023)

Sons, Girls

I’ve been an admirer of Kate for as long as she has been acting. Her style is consistent across projects, regardless of their quality. Spotless Mind and her Ophelia alone score a justified life. A woman like this wants better roles than the tide brings in, so she created this. These projects fascinate me, because you need different skills to be a filmmaker than to be an actor. And in this case the filmmaker is a first timer.

The script is a merger of more things than should work. But they do, well enough.

There’s a framing device that is so clever and so unexpected I have to say that I would recommend it purely on how it is pulled off.

There’s a story about a woman who we presume is pretty and fun. Someone who can carry that well enough to have a career as a model. She conveys this to image-maker herself, and works to go where the action is — sponsored by Vogue, a fashion magazine. She falls into a broken world and at least manages to stay afloat, and at most captures horrors. It is a second horror that her photos were not published by her sponsor… because unhappy stories fight happy ones that sell. She ages.

Then there are the stories within, which are about war, but personalised as stories of women: shamed collaborator women, nurses, a friend crippled by grief, a girl in a death camp, a Parisian being raped… War surrounds, but the women have the faces Lee sees.

And finally we have the story of an older Lee, being interviewed. I suspect there could be a director’s cut at some point that gives the attention to narrative that Kate gives as an actor. She’s clearly got some deep unhappiness she’s carried. This is the framing story that has the effect I mentioned earlier, involving her interviewer.

Kate is carrying all three of these. The first of the three is the least successful, in part because the filmmaker did not deliver the feel of prewar bohemian Paris from whence she came.

Posted in 2024

Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.

IMDB