After Jackie and Neruda, Chilean director Pablo Larraín reconfirms his passion for bringing back to life iconic personalities from the recent past with Spencer, a film about Princess Diana. It is not the first biographical film about the life of Prince Charles’ ex-wife, she was played in 2013 by Naomi Watts in the film Diana, without impressing anyone.
The love that the global public has for Diana Spencer still seems immense, hence the incredulous reactions to the news that Kristen Stewart, best known for the Twilight movies (although her career is much more complex than that), will play Lady Di. The most common objection is that “Stewart doesn’t look like Princess Diana,” a fantasy objection because no known actress actually looks like the one she might play in a biographical film.
Natalie Portman doesn’t look like Jacqueline Kennedy either, and yet she played very well in Jackie, and Michelle Williams definitely doesn’t look like Marilyn Monroe and yet she played her in My Week with Marilyn. Probably for the princess’s fans, only a clone of her would-be worth playing in a biographical film.
Interestingly, the film does not retrace Diana’s entire life, but only a few days in the early 1990s, when she has to make the hardest choice of life: whether or not to divorce Prince Charles, thus relinquishing her future status as queen. and becoming an outcast of the British monarchy. We may see the drop that filled the glass and made the princess claim independence, at any cost.
