‘The Princess’: New Documentary Provides a Haunting Look at Diana’s Life in the Public Eye

Diana doc

The film, with its deft editing and juxtapositions, allows us to examine our own role in the life story of the People's Princess. Photo: Courtesy of Bell Media

As someone who has read and watched a LOT of stuff about Diana Spencer across the biography and fictionalized spectrum, I had trouble imagining there could possibly be anything new said or shown about the late princess. So I approached The Princess, directed by Ed Perkins — which debuts on HBO Aug. 13 at 8 p.m,, just ahead of the 25th anniversary of her death on Aug. 31 — with trepidation. That’ll teach me: I was instead sucked right in and back in time through a series of emotions, nostalgia mixed with dissonance. 

The opening montage is footage from a tourist in Paris just after the car carrying Diana crashed in the tunnel at Place D’Alma. The footage is discombobulating and jumpy, taken from inside a car as the shooter expresses awe at passing outside the Hotel Ritz (where Diana and Dodi Fayed had just left). They then see an accident ahead. It transported me immediately to Aug. 31, 1997, establishing that discombobulating and jumpy is the right way to disarm the viewer and activate the time machine. 

 

 

That’s the thing with the all-archival approach to this film. It brings you smack back to the moment, in a visceral manner. The newsreels in particular show the reaction of everyday people to Diana: the sea of humanity at the formal events (her wedding and her funeral) that bookend the film, her daily life in the public eye and the intense and intrusive media glare that came with that fame. The crowds are jubilant and devastated in equal measure, both operatic in pitch and volume.  

Thus, this is a story not so much about Diana, although she is front and centre throughout, from her first days dating Prince Charles until her coffin is carried past sobbing crowds lining the street on the way to Althorp, her childhood family home and private final resting place. But it is also about us, the public and the consumers of all details large and small about her life. 

 

Diana doc
The funeral procession for Diana, Princess of Wales, Sept. 6, 1997. Photo: Courtesy of Bell Media

 

A moment that stood out for me, as someone who often notes the details of royal women and their outfits, was a group of fashion journalists taking notes surrounding a press secretary offering up details of Diana’s wedding finery. “Do you want the shoes, too?” Yes, they did. Yes, we all did, thank you very much.  

The past few years have seen a reckoning about how the media — and all of us — have dealt with celebrities, especially female ones. Britney Spears and the way we all watched her struggle in not just the spotlight but also with mental illness stands out as a prime example. Like Diana, she was asked incredibly intrusive questions about her body and her life in interviews. And looking back now on how Diana was dissected, simultaneously revered and trashed, through the lens of 2022, is tough to stomach. Again, seen in real-time archival footage, it hits differently, knowing as we do her fate and her legacy. 

 

Diana doc
Diana is surrounded by police and security as she arrives for a visit to Harlem Hospital’s pediatric AIDS unit in Harlem. New York City, February 1989. Photo: Courtesy of Bell Media

 

 

The Royal Fishbowl

 

The Royal Family is a fishbowl. Charles was born into it. As he describes in an old interview in the film, he found a way to compartmentalize the cameras poking at his face from every angle, ready to seize upon and read into every fleeting grimace or awkward moment. Diana was thrust headlong and unprepared and alone into the glare at just 19 years old. We see the couple’s engagement interviews again, tragic in retrospect, when they couldn’t come up with a single thing they had in common.  

There is a haunting clip of Diana, in a frilly blouse peeking out from underneath a jumper, with a news reporter following her to her car from her pre-engagement flat share in London to her job as a nanny. The reporter is right in her face, asking polite enough but totally inappropriate questions about why the prince had not proposed on her birthday. Diana is insanely polite back, repeating, “No comment,” but it is also the moment you see her beginning to recognize the power of the cameras in her life — that they could be both good and bad, they could accomplish both harmful and helpful things for her. The clip captures the quintessential Diana moment, looking up through her signature fringe with those enormous blue doe eyes. She is both evasive and flirting. 

 

Lady Diana walking through fashionable Kensington, while kids chanted “Prince Charles’ girlfriend”.  November 20, 1980,  London. Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images

 

That dichotomy, that polarity really, carries on through the clips in the film. It echoes what William and Catherine, and more poignantly Harry and Meghan, went through with the press, and continue to endure. The Royal Family, entombed in ritual and tradition, does not do well with any iconoclastic, or individualistic, vibes from the women who marry into the fold. Catherine went in one direction, mainly towing the line to the point of appearing to be astonishingly perfect, though adding in stealth reforms (like a maternity leave and a slow, private start to married life in Wales); Meghan went full-on wrecking ball to the status quo, more Diana than Diana ever was.  

They are all equally valid responses from these three women: a departed mother-in-law and the women who married her sons long after her tragic death. No judgment here: surviving the royal fishbowl is well-nigh impossible in the modern age. The tabloids and their telephoto lenses are still a plague on celebrities everywhere, royals most especially. Women are still torn down with much more venom and impunity than are men. 

 

Diana doc
Diana at the Royal Ascot, June 1990. Photo: Courtesy of Bell Media

 

The footage follows Diana as she becomes a mother, then an international celebrity outshining Charles, then a pariah with the publication of My True Story, eventually revealed to have been written in collaboration with Andrew Morton, which lit the whole sordid and tragic truth on fire indeed.  

It is startling to hear snippets of the actual Squidgy tapes (intercepted conversations between Diana and her lover, James Hewitt), and the Camillagate tapes (Charles, Camilla, her panties and a tampon). Back in the day, tabloids charged people to dial in to a dedicated line to hear the illicitly obtained recordings. 

The breakdown of the Wales’ marriage is played out in the British public’s loud and garrulous response, too. We hear from both commentators and regular British citizens their passionate and opposite opinions, which is also discombobulating. What resonates most is how people, any people, any of us, ever felt the right to express our views about how these actual human beings were behaving — or worse, how they looked or what we “felt” about them? When and why did that become okay, and has anything changed in the intervening 25 years? The ’90s aren’t so far away, and we as content consumers are not as far removed (or elevated, or reformed) from those days as we think we are.  

The Princess asks some tough questions without having to say them aloud. The film, with its deft editing and juxtapositions, allows us to examine our own role in the life story of Lady Diana. And the vintage ’80s and ’90s fashions and haircuts, plus the secondary celebrity players in Diana’s story (from John Travolta to Hillary Clinton, to a petulant Christopher Hitchens) are a great pleasure along the way. 

The Princess, directed by Ed Perkins, debuts on HBO (Crave in Canada) on Aug. 13 at 8 p.m. EDT.