Diana and Me
Few films can have suffered from such unfortunate timing as Diana and Me. Completed just before the death of the Princess of Wales in 1997, it seemed as if it would be too tasteless to release a film about an Australian girl of the same name and birthday, who has an obsession with her famous namesake. The original film, taste-less in other, more literal ways (i.e., lacking in flavour), was rushed into theatrical exhibition late last year, bookended by scenes of the hero-ine mourning the death of the other Diana Spencer. Now it appears on the shelves of video libraries, but, how-ever you look at it, nothing is ever going to make the rest of the film seem funny or charming in the circum-stances. For my part, with or without its prologue and epilogue set outside Kensington Palace with the chas-tened Diana adding her flowers to the tributes, this would never have been very funny or charming. Romantic comedy is not a genre in which the new Australian cinema has excelled, and even America rarely pulls off a success these days in a field in which it once so effortlessly triumphed. Diana and Me is, to be fair, a smarter piece of work than such other Australian genre pieces as The Best of Friends (Michael Robertson, 1982) or Breakfast in Paris (John D. Lamond, 1982), but that is like praising a three-year-old for saying “Please”. There is no sense of inevitability in the final Heathrow embrace which clinches the construction of the romantic couple as there is no chemistry between Toni Collette as the Wollongong Diana and Dominic West as Naylor, the London paparazzo for whom she ditches her Australian boyfriend.
Romantic comedy depends on irresistibly attractive leads whom, whatever happens along the way, we expect to be in each other’s arms at the end. Cotette’s charmlessness has worked in her favour in the past, notably in Muriel’s Wedding (P.J. Hogan, 1994), and it might have worked here if the scriptwriters hadn’t felt the generic need of this final clinch and had let a sadder and wiser Diana return to Australia. The Diana she creates belongs convincingly to the early Australia-set scenes and to her first gawky encounters with London and snooty Purls (there we echoes of Barry McKenzie here); but everything about her screen persona makes her unacceptable as the conveitional romantic heroine the film ultimately wants her to be. And she is not helped by West who, good looking enough to function as a romantic lead, lacks variety and lightness of touch. Once past the 1997 prologue and back in New South Wales eighteen months earlier, the film looks as if it might have enough vulgar comic vigour to sustain our interest. The women’s magazine editor in a yellow suit, barking out orders to her underlings about the need to find a winner in the fly-to-England-and-meet-Diana-competition, is genuinely funny in Veronica Longley’s performance and so is her London counterpart, Carol (Victoria Eagger), of the awesome vowels.
There is a lively veracity, too, about the scenes in Wollongong (all belching chimney stacks) in which Diana learns that she has won the trip for two to London to meet her idol. Cut to plane heading north, then circling over Windsor, arrival at the crummy hotel which is part of tre prize and a lot of legitimately used tourist clichés about London. Not long after this it all begins to unravel; the comic invention falters and becomes little more than a few wild car chases as the paparazzi pursue the famous Diana in scenes which now inevitably seem tacky. Diana and Naylor fall on each other before falling for each other, but the increasingly wild situations in which they find themselves as she works towards achieving her goal of meeting Diana are just that: wild situations which aren’t funny or fresh enough to taper over the cracks of plot contrivance and logical absurdity. In great romantic comedy, we oughtn’t to be aware of these. At heart, perhaps what is most seriously amiss with Diana and Me is that it isn’t in the end about anything much. There is, for instance, nothing to compare with the underlying conflict between life-denying immersion in work and irrepressible zest which anchors a great romantic comedy like Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks, 1938). I’d maintain that all great comedy is seriously based; without this, one ends up with entertaining and forgettable hits and pieces. Here we have an ordinary Australian ginrl obsessed with and faced with the prospect of meeting a cultural icon on the other side of the world. That might have been the basis for a sharp satirical comedy, but the film offers only the most superficial appraisal of the phenomenon of celebrity and the power it can exert.
And it’s not being merely solemn to be asking for something more than we get. Diana’s opening words – “I don’t know about the rest of the world, but I still don’t believe it. She meant so much to me. I really miss her. She changed my life” – entitle us to expect some sort of discourse, comic or otherwise, on the 20th Century’s obsession with stardom and the legend-making propensity of early death. Further, there are brief guest appearances from the likes of Kylie Minogue and Bob Geldoff, (and Susannah York – Susannah York, in 1997, as an instantly recognizable celebrity?) as if to underline this pre-occupation. But nothing incisive or witty or savage ever comes of his. Diana lets nice thick Australian Mark go home alone and Naylor gives up the lie of the paparazzo: the implication is that they are both better people than they were, and that each has come to a realization of the importance of the privacy of private life, both renouncing the kinds of intrusiveness of their earlier behaviour. Tragic reality may have overtaken director David Parker. In other circumstances, he might have made an all-stops-out satire on the cult of celebrity; as it is, Diana and Me is a limp romantic comedy, only intermittently comic and never romantic.
