Diana (2013)
Certified: 12
Duration: 113 minutes
Directed by: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Starring: Naomi Watts, Naveen Andrews, Cas Anvar, Laurence Belcher, Harry Holland, Douglas Hodge, Geraldine James, Charles Edwards, Mary Stockley
KRS release
This was never going to be an easy film, especially since the character around which it revolves was so much in the spotlight and is so fresh in our memory. Diana has come to represent the ideal “princess”, the tragic victim, the people’s champion, the seeker of true love and the ideal mother.
The film is based on the book by journalist Kate Snell, Diana: Her Last Love. In 2004, director Oliver Hirschbiegel already had the difficult task of bringing a different vision of Adolph Hitler to the Germans and the world, but he managed to make cinema history with Downfall.
Diana is a much more different film. First of all, we remain aware throughout that we are watching the actress portraying Diana on screen, Naomi Watts, and not the princess. In long shots, the resemblance is uncanny, but when the camera zooms in, we simply see Watts. The film does not make great efforts to use make-up or any other movie trickery to pass Watts as Diana. It’s as if the production realised that they can never win on this front as the audience is too familiar with the subject, so it was easier to just let the audience feel their way in, get used to the character and take a glimpse of what the real Diana looked, felt and did in real life. It succeeds in this aspect and the audience will get used to Watts after a few sequences.
The film takes a look at Diana in the last years of her life and how she was seemingly being hounded and laid under siege by the Windsors and the press. The chances for her to lead a normal life were simply nil. It is also about the relationship that she had with Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews), a surgeon from Pakistan. This led to her taking up several campaigns against Aids, landmines and other worthy causes.
The film also shows how the relationship with Dodi Fayed (Cas Anvar) was just a leverage on Diana’s part in her relationship with Khan.
The audience will surely want to know what is true or not. Did Diana really speak this way? Did she behave this way? Since Diana is no longer with us, we will never know, and Khan has never given much information.
But the very newspapers that had given their journalists free licence to hound, peg, pester and print anything about Diana, have now turned her into a sort of saint, and we at times forget that, after all, she was a normal woman.
Watts courageously depicts the lonely Diana in a whimsical manner, almost as a woman opening her eyes to the world, yet having control on it.
Diana fans will find it interesting to look behind the glitz of the British Royal Family, while fans of love stories, especially forbidden ones, should enjoy it.