Film review: Diana
Oliver Hirschbiegel, who made a film about Adolf Hitler in 2004 (Der Untergang, released for the English-speaking market under the title Downfall), has now directed a movie about another figure who is not exactly loved in her own country.
Though not generating the same kind of vitriol as Margaret Thatcher, the late princess of Wales was thought to be enjoying the limelight a little more than she let on when she was publicly denouncing the British press’s lack of respect for her privacy.
Diana is a film that only focuses on the last two years of her life, and in particular her on-again, off-again relationship with cardiologist Hasnat Khan. It is easy to see why Hirschbiegel was drawn to this project, as this is again a historical character who was a point of conversation and always in the public eye.
The director, far from empathizing with her, shows the situation in which she finds herself – at the mercy and yet simultaneously at the beck and call of Buckingham Palace – and her inability to realize how difficult it would be to make a relationship work with someone who cherishes his privacy much more than she does, and for whom hers is an alien world.
Read the full review at The Prague Post.
(Still of Naomi Watts in Diana. © 2012 – Ecosse Films)
