A controversial new documentary about the death of Princess Diana is packed with mind-bending speculations and theories – and just happens to be funded by Mohamed al-Fayed
HAD SHE LIVED, Princess Diana would be celebrating her 50th birthday today. Over the 14 years since her death in that Parisian underpass, several versions of the princess have competed for the attention of biographers, columnists and saloon bar pontificators. She was the spirit of the nation. She was a paranoid loon. She was a sort of secular saint.
The oddest manifestation of the Diana myth, however, is that which casts her as a martyr of anti-establishment insurgency. Third child of Viscount Althorpe, baptised at Sandringham, “finished” in Switzerland, the late Duran Duran fan is, surely, nobody’s idea of a latter-day Rosa Luxemburg.
Yet that is, among other madder theories, the argument put forward by a teeth-jarringly controversial – you sense the makers craving the word “incendiary” – documentary from the reliably difficult actor and comedian Keith Allen.
Unlawful Killing, which receives its first public screening at the Galway Film Fleadh next week, has already kicked up a great deal of kerfuffle. At this year's Cannes Festival, where it played out of competition, there was much chatter about the film's supposed inclusion of a gruesome photo depicting the dying princess.
As it happens, the images of the mangled vehicle are fairly uncontroversial. But Allen’s breathless film, which supposes a conspiracy to assassinate Diana, is packed with mind-bending speculations and suppositions.
Let’s dive right in. Here are some of the notions bandied about. Diana’s interest in banning landmines might have interested homicidal sections of the security establishment. The Duke of Edinburgh, who didn’t like the idea of Diana marrying Dodi Fayed, a Muslim, is “a psychopath” with a sordid Nazi past. The royal family are “gangsters in tiaras”. A bright light deliberately directed down the tunnel could have caused the Princess’s car to crash. And so forth.
It is an entertainingly paranoid screed – the dread phrase “how convenient” is never far from Allen’s lips – but the experience is a little like being pinned to the corner of a public house by an unstoppable obsessive. Did he not think of including any dissenting (or do we mean “assenting”) voices? Everybody involved seems to believe that some sort of conspiracy was afoot. “Not really. Why should I?” Allen says.
“I live in a world where there is balance. You can have your right-wing views and I can have mine. It’s my f***ing film. Go watch something else. There are plenty of other films out there if you want a balanced argument.”
Allen is frank about the fact that Mohamed Al-Fayed, the Egyptian businessman whose son died in the car with Diana, put up the money for Unlawful Killing. Fayed, owner of Fulham Football Club, of which Allen is a fanatical supporter, has never accepted the theory that the car crash was just an unhappy accident. He has long argued that the Duke of Edinburgh organised the assassination of Princess Diana and his son.
“I have always been fascinated by him because he gets up the nose of the establishment so much,” Allen says of Fayed. “I come from a world were eccentricity is the norm. So I don’t find him eccentric at all.”
Unlawful Killingpours scorn on the way the official inquest carried out its business and accuses journalists of making up their minds before the verdict was formally announced.
Yet the film’s own arguments are very shaky. Again and again, we return to a letter Diana allegedly wrote to her butler Paul Burrell. The princess appeared to claim that, to do away with her, Prince Charles would eventually engineer a car accident that involved “brake failure and serious head injury”.
So what? How could she possibly have known which (absurdly over-complicated, it should be said) method the supposed conspirators were contemplating? If we accept for a moment that she was murdered, then the letter still seems like nothing more than a coincidence.
“People talk. Don’t they?” What? Conspirators speak to the person they are planning to murder? “Maybe somebody else might have heard somebody else talking. Maybe they then told her. I don’t know. Maybe she saw that as the scenario that was the most likely. All I know is the accusation was written down and recorded.”
Then there's the issue of motive. Allen argues that before Diana's death the then US president Bill Clinton seemed minded to press for a total ban on landmines. But sometime after her fatal crash, he appeared to soften his stance somewhat. How very convenient! Hang on a moment. Unlawful Killingnever tires of exposing supposed discrepancies in the "establishment's" take on Diana's death. Yet, when building its own arguments, no logical structure, however shakily bound together, is seen as too unstable to pass muster.
Did Diana really have that much influence on Clinton? “I don’t think it’s ever about influence,” Allen says. “I think it’s about image. What does Bono do? Does he fix water pumps in Africa? No. It’s to do with an awareness-raising campaign. I don’t know how it might have snowballed if Bill Clinton had stuck by his word.”
When pressed hard, Allen tends to throw his hands in the air and say something like “I am not and don’t pretend to be a documentary film-maker”. In truth, his main job has always been that of provocateur.
RAISED AS THE SON of a Royal Navy submariner, Allen, now 58 and father of singer Lily Allen, lived a "rootless life" as his father followed the vessel to various port towns. He was expelled from school at 13 and spent some time in a borstal. Following stints as a window cleaner and a printer, he eventually found his niche during the punk years. Always something of an anarchist, he had been fired from a job as a stage hand when, while vintage entertainer Max Bygraves was performing, he staggered on stage in the nude. When punk arrived, the rebel moved into stand-up comedy and eventually secured acting roles in such TV series as The Comic Strip Presents. . . and A Very British Coup.He went on to appear in Trainspottingand Shallow Grave.
Through it all, he continued to cause trouble. I had read that he wears a tattoo of Rinka, the unfortunate dog at the heart of the Jeremy Thorpe scandal, somewhere on his upper body. The animal was part of a complex case – far too tangled to explain here – that saw Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party, escape conviction for conspiracy to murder. The judge’s summing up (subject of a famous Peter Cook routine) remains controversial today.
“Yes, I have it on my shoulder,” he confirms. “On the morning that the verdict was returned I went out and had the tattoo done on my shoulder. I just could not believe what I was hearing. Nothing has changed. It’s still the same.”
Allen’s lust for justice would be more convincing if his film was not so overheated and hysterical. Is it really fair for Oliver James, the celebrity psychologist, to label Prince Philip “a psychopath” in the film?
“I can’t bear that man’s racism,” Allen says. “You have to consider what is presented. I don’t base society on racists. You don’t make them the building blocks of the established order. And that’s what he is.” That is (m’lud) Mr Allen’s opinion.
But even if it were true, there is a yawning gap between racist behaviour and fully-fledged psychopathic tendencies. Should Dr James not have met the duke before flinging around that class of diagnosis? Allen let’s out an outraged snort.
“I don’t think that matters. I had never met Max Bygraves when I realised he was a . . . ” Let’s just leave it there before we risk enraging the Singalonga constituency.
Unlawful Killingplays at the Galway Film Fleadh next Wednesday
The 23rd Galway Film Fleadh
The Galway Film Fleadh, now an immovable institution in the film calendar, launches its 23rd edition next Tuesday. The event has, over those two decades, evolved into the prime place to see new Irish features, and the main domestic location for industry negotiations. This year, events kick off with a screening of Darragh Byrne's Parked,starring the great Colm Meaney as a man reduced to living life in his car.
Other Irish releases receiving an unveiling include John Michael McDonagh's The Guard,already a hit a the Sundance Film Festival, Ian Palmer's Knuckle, a controversial documentary on bare-knuckle boxing, Terry McMahon's Charlie Casanova, a searing drama that recently played at Austin's South by Southwest event, and Mary McGuckian's remake of Patrice Leconte's Man on the Train, featuring Larry Mullen's acting debut. As ever, the fleadh will include an exciting series of seminars and special events.
Asif Kapadia, director of Senna,will be on hand to explain how that hit documentary made it to the screen. Martin Sheen, who can be seen in Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Stella Days, will subject himself to public interview. A new strand called the 30-Minute Film Festival will showcase, yes, a busy programme of 30 one-minute films. If you want something more light-hearted then fear not. Pixar's Cars 2will receive its Irish premiere and there is a screening of the gorgeously titled Hobo with a Shotgun. Starring Rutger Hauer, that film concerns a trigger-happy tramp. Obviously.
