The Princess: Diana documentary shows the extent of our obsession

Diana clearly had a difficult marriage to Charles.

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Greg and Zanna watch something they've seen too many times already.

SCORES

New insights: Zero
Willingness to let her rest: Zero
Our moral culpability: Not zero

SHE SAW

The death of Princess Diana is the first major historical event that I remember with clarity and I'm still coming to terms with the fact that the 1990s is distant enough history to be reexamined in a contemporary context. Interestingly, The Princess does little recontextualising itself - there's no modern-day commentary, no talking head reflections - it's the mere passing of time that makes us see the story of Diana for what it was, or should I say for what it is, because in another 25 years, we'll see it differently again.

The HBO documentary by Ed Perkins is told entirely through archival footage, including some personal videos from the public that may be the film's only unseen footage. There are television interviews with Diana and Charles, talk show commentary, filmed public appearances, news and paparazzi footage. It would've been a mammoth task to wade through the hundreds of hours of material and whittle it down to a one hour and 44-minute documentary.

For the most part, I appreciated the lack of "expert" opinion telling me how to think and feel about the public life of Princess Diana, although the film-maker's opinion was felt throughout. There are long holds and slow zooms on Diana's facial expressions, particularly when a smile fades, as if to suggest that if she was truly happy she'd never stop smiling. It must've been exhausting to have had your every expression examined to that extent: at times, no doubt, her face read anguish and torment when in reality she just needed to go to the loo.

The Princess.

Not to undermine the suffering of Diana. She clearly had a difficult marriage to Charles, a tense relationship with the palace and was being relentlessly hounded by the press. As a society, we've reflected a lot in recent years on the peak paparazzi era of the 1990s and how damaging it was to particular celebrities - Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Lindsay Lohan - and it's no surprise that those most scrutinised by the press were and are women.
Diana's death is a symbol of our gross need to interrogate women's sexuality at any cost. In an early clip from when Diana was first acknowledged as Charles' probable bride, a television commentator says Diana's father and her uncle vouched for her virginity. Her untimely death was the result of a press desperate to confirm her libidinousness by way of a photo of her with Dodi Al-Fayed. No longer a virgin, she must've been a whore.

I would've liked to learn something new from The Princess. There was nothing in it that I hadn't seen or heard before but nevertheless it's hard not to be moved by it, if only because of the shameful, avoidable tragedy of her death.

HE SAW

It's a pretty bold move to make a documentary about Princess Diana. What angles, if any, remain for any sort of creative work about someone so voluminously captured on film, in print and via all other available recording methods; someone so commented about in so many forums with so little insight and so much passion?

That is what I asked myself while watching this documentary, which consists of a steady accretion of archival footage, with very little context besides occasional voices recorded at the time - members of the public or broadcasters or the occasional interesting figure. There are no interviews, there's no commentary, no subtitles, no names attached to any of the faces. It plays out like a high-speed unspooling of her life as captured on film, from the moment she first appeared in the public consciousness to the massed international grief that followed her death.

Our first sighting of her is as she's followed from her house by hordes of photographers and journalists while walking to her tiny hatchback on the way to work one morning, some time in her late teens. In light of who and what she was to become, it's almost comic to watch her in that moment, completely unprotected, unguarded, unmediated, as the hordes descend on her and she begins her descent into the dark arc of the life she would live in front of those cameras.

This is the overwhelming and lasting image of the movie: the cameras; everywhere the cameras. And as we judge them, these horrible mostly men following her around, shouting at her, pleading pathetically with her, in the hopes of getting their shot, we're aware that as consumers of this documentary, 25 years after her death, we're continuing to contribute to the culture that made her life so difficult, that drove her to her death. As some awful-seeming photographer in the film comments, we just shoot the photos, the newspapers are the ones that pay for them and the public are the ones that pay for the newspapers, so who's ultimately responsible?

This is a highbrow work, produced by HBO and absent of preaching or moralising. There are no easy takeaways. It has the veneer of art. In its emphasis of the visual record, it reflects the way we reduced her to an image. But is any of this useful? Why, even a quarter of a century since her death, will we not leave this poor woman alone?

The Princess is in cinemas now.