Diana documentary The Princess takes the airbrushing out of history

Wait. Is that Kristen Stewart in The Princess, cast as the bashful young aristocrat hurrying past the cameras on a Pimlico side street? Or could it be Emma Corrin? Last year, Stewart played Princess Diana in the cranked-up psychodrama Spencer; Corrin took the role in the most recent series of The Crown. It surely can’t be the ghost of Diana, the schlock Netflix musical? So many and various have been the dramatised Dianas, it might take a moment to recall the real thing. But there she is in early 1981, dodging the snappers to reach her Mini Metro in Ed Perkins’ ambitious new documentary.

I know. How many times have we been over this? The saving grace is that the film offers no unpicking of the subject’s psyche, no embellishments beyond the record. The record is the point. The mode is archive-only, shards of TV news mosaicked in the style of Asif Kapadia’s collage biographies Senna and Amy. Of course, Perkins has endless material to play with: a 16-year transmission. In place of an all-seeing voiceover, we get the narration of the time, often delivered by that odd creature, the “royal expert”. (In 1981, a plummy example reassures his audience about the likely virginity of the 19-year-old Diana.)

The marriage plays out like the evening news as directed by Ingmar Bergman. Cracking the Windsors’ facade, the new star can’t help but make other royals look bad — before they took the job over themselves. Her embrace of Aids patients and landmine victims speaks of her ability to improvise human connection. Then as now, the in-laws struggle with basic scripted dialogue.

All this is literally old news. Merely reassembling the past would be no more than a school history project. Perkins excels when revealing a bigger, messier picture amid the clips. For instance, a nation that spent 1981 both giddily celebrating the royal wedding and rioting in big cities. Or a media growing so ravenous that it eats everything including itself. (TV crews shooting the paparazzi shooting Diana.)

But the director opens the film in August 1997 through the lens of amateurs, camcording Australian tourists in night-time Paris, chancing on the Pont de l’Alma traffic tunnel. When The Princess returns there, it is with American card players, filming their game as the news breaks. The twin scenes herald a dawning age in which everyone would be their own broadcast operation. Also the global fascination with a woman whom conspiracy theorists would file next to JFK and the aliens of Roswell.

Still, this is a deeply British story. We end with the eternally strange show of radicalised grief after the tragedy. In the moment, the villains were the national press. On the day of the funeral, a newspaper vendor sells special editions of the Sun, Mail and Times: ghoulish irony for all markets. But what of the ordinary public that Perkins rediscovers on daytime TV through the 1990s, loudly contemptuous of the not-yet people’s princess? “A sick mind,” one spits. “She likes to be bloody watched,” another scowls.

Such venom from the British tribe has since been airbrushed from history. The Princess puts it back with a question mark attached. Were these the friends and neighbours of the frenzied mourners outside Buckingham Palace? Or the same people? And was their Britain also the one that supposedly arrived in the summer of 1997, the shiny, future-facing country promised by Tony Blair’s landslide election victory? Rewinding 25 years, The Princess reminds us how few of those puzzles were ever solved — puzzles living on in the Britain of today still stuck in a loveless marriage with itself.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from June 30 and released internationally later this year