"I was good at drinking, having sex and taking pictures": That's how the unabashedly straight-forward and tenacious fromer model and photographer Lee describes herself in the beginning of the movie. In (what later turns out to be an imaginary) interview (with her son), Lee describes her life from the late 1930s all the way to the end of World War II. Living at first in a leisurely way in a bohemian circle of artists and liberals in France, she gets to know her future husband and follows him to London. While the war rages on in Europe, London at first is untouched by it. But soon the German Blitz hits London and Lee, frustrated with her purely domestic life and her lack of resistance to what is going in the world, soon starts to work for Vogue magazine and documents the impact of the war on London by taking pictures of it.
As her husband is required to leave for continental Europe to fight the Nazis, she herself is eager to leave London behind and join the front to document the events of the war. Followed by her friend and compatriot David Schermen, she chronicles the war and its repercussions behind the lines, taking pictures of the wounded and dead, but in her pertinacious way also finds herself soon at the front and in the battlefield, recording both the horrors of the war and the liberation of France and Paris.
Meeting her friends of the beginning of the movie again, who were part of the French resistance, she learns about the millions of people who have "simply disappeared" on trains and who were never heard from again - a fact that a majority of the people, including her friend and boss at Vogue magazine, who are joyously celebrating the liberation of France and the (so they hope) coming and inevitable end of World War II, are unaware of.
Rejecting an offer from her husband, whom she meets again in France, to return home to England, the single-minded Lee ventures deeper into the belly of the beast and joins the final leg of the war, crossing over into German territory. This is where the film, adept at balancing a somber tone with moments of humour, turns chilly and foreboding as Lee and the allies discover the true scope of the horror committed by the Nazis: a nauseating stench, corpses piled on top of each other, trains filled with countless bodies and haggard faces of people barely alive. Lee is part of the liberation of the German concentration camps and one of the first chronicler of the holocaust.
She returns disillusioned and broken home to England and anxiously awaits the release of her pictures in Vogue magazine to reveal to the general public the true terror of World War II. But to her chagrin, her pictures were rejected because they could disturb people too much and stop them from moving on and instead replaced by happy-go-lucky pictures, leaving her devastated. (To be fair to Vogue magazine: Her pictures were released in the American version in June 1945, being given the impactful and apt title "Believe it!".)
While the movie might not leave you feel too happy leaving the cinema, it is an (at times) claustrophobic and uneasy movie that is a stark reminder of the power of pictures and the stories they can tell - a fact that we should be aware of in today's politics and in today's frenzy of fake pictures created by AI. It also serves as a powerful reminder of the horrors caused by racism and fascism in Europe amid the wave of populist and right-wing euphoria spreading across Europe. Most importantly though, Kate Winslet's portrayal of Lee is a tour de force and shows us a woman living full-throtle, determined to not stand idly by, but to capture truth in both the fragility of human experience and its ferocity.
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