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](http://www.sundaytimes.lk/130908/uploads/Australian-actress-Naomi-Watts.jpg)
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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