No rest for Diana – the biopic of the late princess is so inept it’s not even hagiography

Someone who knows their Dianaology will have to fill me in – did this actually happen? The late Princess Di is walking through central Portofino in Italy. She’s being jostled on all sides by an insistent public and an even more insistent swarm of photographers, when, suddenly, the crowds part. There, huddled by his family, is a thin blind man. She reaches out to him and he reaches back, taking her hands. Then he presses at her face as though it’s Braille; trying, as movie blind-people are wont to do, to read her soul. Sunlight streams down from the heavens.

We never see the man’s sight restored — perhaps that’s for the spin-off, Eyes Wide Open: The Diana Miracles — but we get the point. The Diana of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Diana is the Messiah as shot by Mario Testino. We’re meant to sit there in wonder, but we just wonder how anyone ever thought this was a good idea.

Presumably, Naomi Watts once did, which is why she gamely wore a bouffant wig and a prosthetic nose to play the title role, although she might be regretting the effort now. This is a film so inept that, even with its messianic overtones, it cannot be counted as a hagiography. A hagiography idealises its subject, whereas Diana accidently denigrates its. A typical scene has Diana waking up a friend at 3:30 in the morning and wailing, ‘I’ll never be happy again!’ Except she is, the very next day, when she makes up with her Pakistani heart surgeon boyfriend Hasnat Khan. Forget the People’s Princess — this is one annoying drama queen.

That’s mostly what the film is about: the difficult course of her relationship with Khan in the last two years of her life.