With the sheer onslaught of material based around Princess Diana’s life — “The Crown,” “Spencer,” “Diana: The Musical” — the thought of another film taking her famous life is, honestly, a bit draining. What more can one say about the world’s most famous Princess? Her relationships with Prince Charles, her children, Dodi Al Fayed, and the media have been covered so exhaustively that it comes as something of a surprise that Ed Perkins’ HBO documentary “The Princess” manages to be surprising and novel, if not exactly revelatory. Eschewing the traditional talking-head approach that so many others have taken, Perkins’ film instead is constructed entirely of contemporaneous footage. No narrator to guide, no one to contextualize or historicize. Instead, we are given news reporters, home videos, tabloid headlines, and talk show hosts.
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Beginning with Charles and Diana’s courtship, the film hones in on how Diana is constructed as a figure in the media. In early interviews, she is shy and deferential to Charles. But, after their marriage, we see a confident Diana filling out her role as a public figure with grace. This section is juxtaposed against Charles’ increasing dislike of her public persona, as she steals the spotlight away from him and he turns back towards his relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles.
As with all portraits of Diana, we eventually come to the nasty ways in which the media hounded her, with various hosts showing open disdain for her and the public both sympathetic to her but also too enthralled by her presence. Overall, “The Princess” mainly zeros in on how the media constructed and then attempted to dismantle Diana. Once she became more open about her opinions and less reliant on Charles, the tabloids turned against her, eventually culminating in her divorce and subsequent death.
The parasitic relationship between the tabloids and Diana is placed front and center, despite Perkins only using archival material, confident that the footage alone is a damning portrait of mass media without needing anyone to underline the point. He’s right, and watching photographers literally assault Diana to get a picture speaks more about the sheer insanity that followed the royal family more than any historian and cultural critic could.
Yet the film is also placed in the paradoxical position of existing because of the sheer volume of footage about Diana. Perkins wisely uses this footage as an indictment, but it nevertheless suggests a weird and co-dependent relationship between Perkins’ obvious remix and the primary source footage that he is culling from.
Whatever position the film takes on the use of tabloid material is sublimated by the film’s relentless pacing that, honestly, plays out like a thriller, even if you know the ending. Aiding this approach is Martin Phipps’ pulsing score and Jinx Godfrey and Daniel Lapira’s economic editing. For a film that thrusts viewers into the middle of a narrative, one never is lost as to where we are in time and what Diana is doing.
Even if one gets the lingering sense that “The Princess” is just another in a long line of films that attempt to deconstruct Diana’s image and unpack her complicated relationship with the media, Perkins at least has found an imaginative way to stand out from the overcrowded pack. While there is little new to be learned from the film, it’s still an enthralling watch. [B]
