"Diana": Princess Di's romantic life the last two years of her life, and her desire to help others and "show it"

The film “Diana” (2013, by Oliver Birschbeigel) shows the last two years of Princess Diana’s life (with Naomi Watts), centered around her secret love affair with Pakastani heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews), followed by a fing with Dodi Fayed (Cas Anvar).  

  

The film does not show or recreate the actual crash in the Paris tunnel shortly after midnight Paris time on Aug. 31, 1997. But it starts on that date, and creates a sense of foreboding with sound and music effects, as in a Stephen King film. Then it tells the story of the last two years of the Princess of Wales’s life.

  

I recall the weekend that she died.  I was moving from the DC area to Minneapolis that Labor Day weekend. On Friday night, I stayed with an aunt in an apartment building in Oberlin, Ohio.  I heard about the accident in the elevator.

  

There’s a scene where Princess Di dons scrubs and watches Khan do a coronary bypass surgery. He says that the patient would have died in a day or two. Now he gets ten more years.  My own mother had coronary bypass surgery two years later, in 1999, at age 85.  She got eleven more years.  But there is a question as to whether society can continue these forever without a cohesive enough family.  See the review of “Money and Medicine, Nov. 5). Here we could get into discussions about Medicare and Obamacare (US) or the National Health System (Britain). 

  

Princess Di devotes a lot of time to helping people, personally, visiting the sick, and she says (to an intrusive paparazzi photographer she wants to “show it” – with privacy..  Later, she travels to Angola, and walks night (really day) infiltration through a former land mine.  

   

   

The official site (E-one and Ecosse) is here. 

   

I saw the film at the AMC Shirlington Theater in Arlington VA before a small Friday night crowd.

Picture: Oberlin, Ohio (mine), 2010