World War II films are a dime a dozen, especially around Remembrance Sunday and award season. For a film like Lee to find new ground to cover could have proved difficult. But, in these times of “fake news”, AI-distorted facts, and outright falsehoods, a film about the significance of bearing witness to events feels all the more important.

Lee follows Lee Miller (Kate Winslet), a former model who became a photographer. Concerned for her French friends, and feeling useless with her artist husband Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård) busy perfecting camouflage during the Second World War, Miller decides to pitch herself as a photographer of the war for British Vogue and to travel to the war zone to capture it.

Former cinematographer Ellen Kuras, who shot another Winslet-starring film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), makes her directorial debut here and does so with confidence and restraint. Karus often frames the film in a washed-out palette, mimicking Miller's photography style and capturing her transition from a carefree model and photographer (complete with sun-drenched garden parties) to someone fighting against a system to matter.

This could have been an Erin Brockovich “woman against the sexist men film” but for the most part Kuras—and the screenwriters Liz Hannah, John Cole and Marion Hume—avoid that in favour of a more serious point about chronicling history at the time. In the age we are in where genocides are happening and people appear to avoid reacting, it's important to tell stories of people who did chronicle them and to do so there must be a witness.

Kuras doesn't go for shock, but shows the toll that taking pictures of torture and death can have on someone. Winslet has always been able to convey quiet dignity, but here also gets to show off a bravado she is often denied in the more stuffy roles she is landed with. Moreover, her scenes with Andy Samberg are filled with a budding friendship that is hard to dislike. Both Winslet and Samberg fill Miller and fellow photographer David Scherman with a drive and resolve that belies the toll war crimes is having on them.

Some of the more horrific moments aren't of Nazi war crimes but of what war can do to otherwise civilised people. Moments such as when Miller stops an American soldier from raping a French woman, and a group of Parisians turning on a young woman who was taken advantage of by a Nazi and labelled a collaborator. It's these moments that show how war infects everyone and turns them sour. Juxtaposing the fun, often topless drinks parties where Penrose and Miller, with her friends Solange (Marion Cotillard), Nusch (Noémie Merlant) and Paul (Vincent Colombe), with the horrors that those who remain in France face is particularly moving. Not least when Cotillard can barely explain the horrors that she and her husband have faced for being part of the rebellion.

If there are missteps, the Alexandre Desplat score which is classic Desplat, lurches between foreboding and almost incidental at times when it shouldn't, and the wrap-around plot line adds nothing. It also doesn't help that Samuel Barnett plays Vogue editor Cecil Beaton so broadly it could be classed as slander.

But for the most part, Lee is an absorbing, and timely tale of bearing witness to war and making sure that the events are preserved so that no one can claim it didn't happen—and that those that do are nothing short of criminals in their own right. Kuras' film is a reminder that history observed is history remembered.

Lee is released on Sky Cinema on 13th September 2024.