10 Aug 2022

Review: The Princess

From At The Movies, 7:30 pm on 10 August 2022

The Princess is the latest retelling of the story of Charles and Diana – by my count about number 506, including last year’s Spencer starring Kristen Stewart, Diana starring Naomi Watts, and of course the ongoing – and to me definitive – TV series The Crown.

I would have thought these would have told us all anyone could possibly want to know about the story – from fairy-tale beginning to perfect tragedy ending.

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Photo: JEAN-LOUP GAUTREAU

But no. I failed to account for the fact that, for fans of the Royal Soap Opera, there’s never enough.  

This version uses a similar technique to previous celebrity documentaries like Senna – about the late Formula One driver Ayrton Senna – and Amy – about the late pop star Amy Winehouse. Contemporary footage, no commentary or subsidiary interviews.

And while much of this footage is familiar – you might say over-familiar – it does offer one thing that a drama can’t.  You actually see Diana. And there was nobody quite like the real thing.

It was Diana’s elusiveness that captured people’s attention as much as the fact she’d married the heir to the throne.  

Was she really the sweet, not particularly bright ingenue she initially sold herself as?  Was she the later, more confident pop star, keen to connect with the fans?  Did she really turn into the bitter “woman scorned”, out for revenge?

As much as anything, The Princess is about the people making those sorts of decisions – the media, the pundits, and of course the public.   

The people’s role in the build-up of Diana was critical, both driving up the market, then complaining about the people they employed to deliver their daily fix.

As the HBO-produced documentary continues, Diana herself starts to fade into the background, replaced by endless reactions to her from would-be experts - both professional and self-appointed.

It’s instructive to have our noses rubbed in what’s essentially the birth of the whole social media phenomenon, long before the outlet for it had been invented.

The worst aspect of the story was watching the media and the public – each egging the other on – turn on their one-time darling as the royal marriage fell apart.  

Whether they felt betrayed that the Romance of the Century didn’t follow the script they demanded, or whether they were just a bit sick of the story, their behaviour was appalling.

But it was soap opera.  It wasn’t real, not like the births, deaths and marriages in people’s own lives. So, they felt free to say whatever they liked.  

And when the marriage was over, and Princess Diana started to launch a comeback, the public mood turned again. She was now a survivor. Until of course the tragic end.

The part everyone remembers of the story - Diana’s shocking death in Paris and the huge outpouring of grief at her funeral – predictably gets more than its fair share of coverage in The Princess.  But it got more than its fair share in real life too.

The Princess is a safe, unexciting work.  It certainly doesn’t offer the insights of The Crown or The Queen starring Helen Mirren.  Sometimes fiction is the only way to get into a true story.

The most telling bit of The Princess is right at the beginning.  A bunch of English holidaymakers in Paris are trying out their new video camera in the car just as they pass a crowd of paparazzi waiting for Diana to emerge from a restaurant.  

Five minutes later, everything had changed.  Blasé curiosity turned into morbid fascination. A fascination that’s lasted 25 years now.

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