The Murder of Princess Diana · 2007-08-24 17:56
The 10th anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, is not the sort of occasion that American television networks let go to waste. TLC’s “Diana: Last Days of a Princess” and CNN’s “Growing Up Diana” have already graced screens of the USA this month. Still to come are BBC America’s “Diana: In the Name of Love” and Starz’s presentation of “Diana: The Witnesses in the Tunnel.”
As anyone can guess from the title, “The Murder of Princess Diana,” like the book by Noel Botham from which it was adapted, is a compendium of Diana conspiracy theories: the royal family/MI6/C.I.A./international arms dealers marked her for death because she was pregnant/she was going to marry a Muslim/she was about to put a crimp in land-mine sales and covered it up by erasing the surveillance tapes/faking the driver’s blood test/killing her in the ambulance. Or were they trying to kill Dodi?
Jennifer Morrison plays Rachel, an American reporter for a British newspaper whose French lover happens to be the policeman assigned to control the crowds outside the Ritz in Paris, where Diana and Dodi al-Fayed are spending their last days.
The film opens with clips of the real Diana, who tells an interviewer that she upsets people because her strength “causes the confusion and fear.” The notion at work here is the one that makes it a Lifetime movie: the paralleling of the princess and a pea-brained reporter as headstrong, independent women who end up, as all such women must, in peril.
• Knightley criticises young people seeking fame
• Four suspects have been released without charge
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