How much Spencer really tells Princess Diana

When you look back on Princess Diana’s precisely documented life, it’s easy enough to figure out what she was doing on any given day. The December 1991 news shows her attending a fundraiser for World AIDS Day Four, taking Prince Harry and Prince William to a show at the Royal Albert Hall, and visiting Glasgow to see a medical research center. Though Spencer, the biopic with Kristen Stewart as a trapped and haunted Diana is set in that specific month and year, these are not the kinds of events that director Pablo Larraín brings to life on the screen. Instead, the narrative of the film, which was released in the US on November 5 (in Italy it will arrive on January 20, 2022), centers on a series of decisions that Diana must have made at the time while traveling around England. The press was already speculating that her relationship with Prince Charles would soon be over – a cover of People dedicated to their 10th anniversary that summer called their marriage a “painful fake” – and in December 1992, the couple would announce their separation.

To fill this gap, the film relies on informed speculation, telegraphing its intentions in a short epigraph: “A fable from a real tragedy.” Still, Stewart’s embodiment of the famous woman is compelling enough. In the first few minutes, an agitated Princess Diana gets lost on her way to Sandringham in December. On the Times Royal correspondent Roya Nikkhah stressed that she probably would have no problem getting to the estate where she spent her childhood and which she visited occasionally until her death, but the scene served as an invitation to suspend my disbelief for a few hours. . She finds herself on a winding road, she needs assistance, when he sees in the distance a weather-worn scarecrow, and takes its jacket, which once belonged to his father. The garment reappears throughout the film, becoming a symbol of her desire for safety, her regret, and how her maiden name could encapsulate an innocent, unbridled version of herself.

None of this actually happened, of course, but Spencer uses the Christmas holidays in Sandringham in 1991 as a stage piece to represent 10 years of accumulated frustration and pain. He dwells on the emotions we know he must have felt for years – his struggle with bulimia and the suicide attempts that went public in Andrew Morton’s 1992 book, Diana: Her True Story, and the overwhelming sadness she felt for Camilla Parker-Bowles, which she then hinted at when she spoke to Martin Bashir in 1995 – and packs them all into one weekend, aestheticizing her trauma in a lush but claustrophobic setting.

In addressing these indelibly heavy emotions in 2021, 24 years after her death, the film is as interested in the myth of Diana as it is in the woman herself, and hinges on dramatic irony, the foreknowledge of her future that Diana cannot possibly have. as he rides the streets of Norfolk in his convertible. Portraying the princess at a time when she is consciously considering her future and her legacy, Spencer forcefully poses the questions our collective obsession with Diana takes for granted. How should we think about her quest for freedom when we know she will be alone for about five years? How should we think of the person who really existed when we know that his tragic end will make him a kind of cultural martyr?

Fictional storytelling is a fruitful way to think about Diana’s life stories that she herself has never been able to tell. Princess Stewart has an obsessive desire to visit her childhood home, Park House, and a deep attachment to that jacket, but the real Diana didn’t seem to be particularly nostalgic for her tumultuous childhood. (That said, her father, John Spencer, died of a heart attack in March 1992, just a few months before she and Carlo separated, and her grief must have played a role in her subsequent loneliness and despair. Ken Wharfe spoke to a sobbing Diana soon after learning of her death, later writing: “She looked like a lost girl who suddenly realizes she is completely alone in the world”).

The centrality of Anna Bolena is another narrative leap that the film takes with profound effect. Aside from a famous joke she is said to have made as a teenager about how fun it would have been to marry in the family “like Anna Bolena,” it doesn’t seem that Diana was particularly concerned by the thoughts of Henry VIII’s executed second wife. But the archetypal connection between the two women – used and cast aside by real men – seems impossible to deny. In Spencer, a meddlesome squire, played by Timothy Spall, places a biography of Boleyn in Diana’s room at Sandringham, ostensibly as a reminder to behave. It is a comment on the way in which the “men in gray suits”, whom Diana disdained, used subtle tricks and implications to strengthen their power in the palace.

Now that the extent of the couple’s split is well documented, it is impressive that Diana and Carlo were able to keep the facade for as long as they did, perhaps thanks to the typical work of the palace to maintain an abyss between the private lives of all royalty and public figures. Interviews are tightly controlled, and most of what we know about what goes on inside the palace is second-hand, provided by a phalanx of press officials, friends of the family and aides talking in secret. The unknowability of the most photographed people on the planet is a paradox often described by biographers – and by the palace itself – as the mystique of the monarchy. It is so central to their self-concept, in fact, that many of the machinations of the family press and fear of exposure are designed to preserve it.