Towards the beginning of this intelligent documentary on the sad, weird, contentious life of Diana, Princess of Wales, we see footage of Sir Robin Day, then the BBC’s inquisitor-in-chief, asking a studio audience whether, as her wedding looms, the press should “lay off” the poor girl. You can guess how the informal plebiscite works out. The audience overwhelmingly votes “yes”. The next day they buy the same newspapers, listen to the same radio shows and ogle the same television reports. Does the paparazzo who is interviewed later have a point when he notes that “the buck stops with the reader”? That is too pat. The media, then facing no competition from the online world, had its own responsibility in shaping the market.
At any rate, viewers of Ed Perkins’s film will, wincing at Diana’s treatment, be guiltily aware that, 25 years after her death, they are still consuming the images. The miracle of The Princess is that, despite so much of the material being familiar, it somehow manages to avoid redundancy. Working with no voiceover, no captions and no contemporary talking heads, the director cuts together archival footage into an impressively seamless whole.
We begin near the end with tourists — shooting with something larger than a smartphone — noticing a hubbub outside the Hôtel Ritz in Paris on the evening of August 31st, 1997. We then move back to the famous images of Lady Diana Spencer smilingly (still) dismissing the press as she moves from her place of work to her humble hatchback. Many more “famous images” follow — the excruciating engagement interview, the polo match, the Taj Mahal and on and on — but there are one or two less-familiar shockers. Princess Anne confirms her reputation for equestrian language when, asked about Diana just after the birth of Prince William, she snorts: “I don’t know. You tell me.”
Perkins injects interest into even the most overexposed sequences by layering them with an endless, grating, often mean-spirited chorus of commentators, reporters, establishment figures and vox-popped members of the public. Everyone had a view. A depressing number argue that she relished the attention even as it was driving her to mental illness. To this day, the world has a strong opinion. Those who don’t care a fig for the UK royal family often insist on saying as much in the most vigorous language imaginable and as often as they are able. All will find something of interest in this occasionally chilling study of a still-bewildering phenomenon (even if they feel obliged to wear a disguise and watch clandestinely).
