Film Review: Diana in Love, a reflective royal ‘what if’.
What if Princess Diana spent time in Malibu, California, and the paparazzi didn’t get one shot? What if she had a dalliance with an Italian movie star and you didn’t know anything about it? Or that she got to hang out unnoticed on a sun-kissed beach with a close group of friends? Surely not.
More than a quarter of a decade on from her premature passing, the myth of Diana has not just grown up around her but has become an unstoppable train. Today, her own two children and their squabbles, marriages and offspring are more likely to be the content you consume on a daily basis but Diana still looms large in British culture. We simply cannot let go and what’s interesting about that is how many interpretations we’re now seeing of a woman few of us genuinely knew in real life.
Diana in Love, is not just a love letter to the woman herself from the pen of Brent Roske, who also produced and directed the movie, it’s also an intimate ‘what if’ and a chance to reflect on not just the princess’s choices in life but our own.
Shot in a reality TV documentary style, it stars Shanti Fiennes, who is a member of another family dynasty (her dad is composer Magnus Fiennes and her uncles are actors Ralph and Joseph). Whilst Diana in Love doesn’t have anything like the budget of The Crown, what Shanti brings to her portrayal of the world’s most famous woman is impressive. (And if Roske has his way his Diana could be competing with The Crown’s Elizabeth Debicki for a Golden Globe).
Sometimes wistful, sometimes demanding, Shanti’s Diana combines the perfect blend of joy, apprehension and melancholy. Her voice is particularly startling. Close your eyes and you’d be hard pressed to decide who was the real Diana and who was the actor.
Set in the summer of 1997, just weeks before her death, Diana’s in Malibu to look at mansions with her beau Dodi Fayed. There’s something incredibly sweet about seeing her doing normal stuff like enjoying a bike ride on the beach with her friends, or schoolgirl giggling at handsome men in fast cars. Shanti does a wonderful job of illustrating the pull of a potential and intoxicating new life on the west coast of America, with the undeniable pull of her young children William and Harry, who reside back in the UK. It would be crass to draw a direct parallel with the current life of the Duke of Sussex but there’s no running away from it. Those who breakaway often have tough choices to make.
Ultimately, what touched me (as someone who is not a royalist), is how Diana comes across as real woman and not just an icon on the cover of Vanity Fair or a commemorative tea towels. I can remember seeing the photos of Diana posing on yacht in the Med back in ’97. She looked free. She wasn’t. But my friends and I cheered at the fact she’d escaped a bad and crowded marriage. This film is anything but crowded. Roske’s direction ensures that it’s lingering and sparse. But it’s Shanti’s light touch on a such a heavily-rotated subject, which expertly explores an imagined side of Diana, that makes you yearn for an alternate outcome to an ultimately tragic story.
Diana in Love premieres on the Flamingo Network on Roku on Sunday, October 1.
