Sunday Times 2
Critics savage”cheap and cheerless” Diana film
View(s):LONDON (Reuters) – Film critics have savaged a new movie of the late British Princess Diana’s relationship with a Pakistani doctor as an intrusive and embarrassingly cheap soap opera. British-born Australian actress Naomi Watts plays the jilted princess trapped in a gilded cage. English actor Naveen Andrews is heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, who gives her the love she craves in “Diana”, which held its world premiere in London on Thursday.
Australian actress Naomi Watts in her role as the late Princess Diana (Reuters)
The British tabloids – who followed every twist and turn from Diana’s 1981 marriage to Prince Charles, to their divorce and her death in a 1997 Paris car crash – were scathing about the film from German director Oliver Hirschbiegel. ”The Queen of Hearts has been recast as a sad-sack singleton that even Bridget Jones would cross the street to avoid,” wrote the Mirror’s David Edwards in a one-star review dubbing the film a “cheap and cheerless effort”.
The movie is based on “Diana: Her Last Love”, a book by author Kate Snell published in 2000, which argues that the estranged wife of the heir to the British throne had a clandestine affair with Khan in the last two years of her life. ”Even when these lines are delivered by the fragrant Naomi Watts, doing her level best with a squirmingly embarrassing script, this film is still atrocious and intrusive,” wrote Kate Muir in the Times newspaper.
The real-life Hasnat Khan vowed in August he would never watch the film, saying it is all based on hypotheses and gossip. Watts told Reuters from a thinly attended red carpet that she was concerned about what Diana’s sons, Princes William and Harry, might think of the film if they were to see it.
“If they do I hope they feel that we have been respectful and upheld her memories in the best possible way,” she told Reuters Television.
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