Near the end of the teaser for Diana, the upcoming biopic starring Naomi Watts as the princess of Wales, a title card tells us, “The legend is never the whole story.” For now, though, the movie’s marketers seem content to burnish the legend, giving us swelling music over very familiar scenes in the life of “the people’s princess” (a label proudly displayed by another title card): the charity work, the adoring crowds, the insatiable paparazzi.
We also get brief glimpses of Hasnat Khan, the heart surgeon and lover whom Diana “used to smuggle into Kensington Palace in the boot [i.e., trunk] of her butler Paul Burrell’s car,” and of Dodi Fayed, the boyfriend and billionaire’s son who was killed along with Diana in a car crash in Paris in 1997. The movie, which was directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, will reportedly focus on Diana’s relationships with those two men during the last two years of her life. It will premiere in the U.K. on Sept. 5 and arrive in American theaters sometime after that.
