Not that directors Will Jessop and Barnaby Peel aren’t geniuses. They did a four-part series, micro-analyzing the circumstances of her death in the Alma Tunnel on August 31, 1997, stretching and pulling cellophane-like historical material over faded bouquets outside Kensington Palace. Only occasionally can you hear this heartbreaking sound. Again, we hear Earl Spencer’s eulogy. once again, Diana fakes looking over her shoulder in old snaps. once again, Tony Blair hitches New Labour’s pony to her celebrity bandwagon with his oxymoronic appeal to the people’s princess. Jessop and Peel astutely note that her death fueled the infant internet’s mutation into a post-truth tool, allowing every disaffected bosom to sicken their conspiracy theories about her death. But, more importantly, Jessop and Peel have reworked Diana’s death so that Investigating Diana feels like it wants to be this summer’s Tiger King or Making a Murderer. In 1997, Diana’s death marked, in part, a softening of Britain’s stiff upper lip, a curious release of grief among many for a woman they barely knew. Today it means something else: Diana’s investigation satisfies our obsessive gaze with a true CSI Paris that drags the story into overdrive. That said, there are moments of clever art. Eric Gigou, the investigator of the Brigade Criminelle, remembers releasing the innocent paparazzi from custody. At that time, he told them that, just beyond that door, there was a wall of snapdragons ready to take their pictures. The shot lingers, for several seconds, on the street door framed by ominous flashing lights, the hunters preparing to become the hunted. But did the paparazzi lead Diana, Dodi Fayed and their driver Henry Paul to their deaths, as Earl Spencer suggested at her funeral? Someone wrote ‘Paparazzi – Assassins’ near the crime scene. Another graffiti in English read: “The Queen did it.” Can we conclude that the paps were not working for the crumbs of the media moguls, but for Her Majesty’s secret services? And that the repeated details of the photographers interviewed here are just a smoke screen? Jacques Langevin came to Eichmann’s defense: “I was just doing my job.” And what a deal: some grandparents reportedly made £1m a year from Diana pix alone. “I didn’t kill anyone,” adds Langevin. Quite right: there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to contradict this claim. Sure enough, Gigou and his team found nothing to suggest that Paul, the driver quickly demonized by the British tabloids for allegedly being four times over the legal French alcohol limit when the Mercedes 600 crashed at 121 mph into it the tunnel, was to blame. The program dismisses the possibility that his slander in the British press might have had a function – to steer us away from the perpetrators who, as a grieving Mohamed Al Fayed told us in contemporary footage, murdered his son and her lover. Two witnesses interviewed in Investigating Diana lend slight credence to a hit-and-run. François Lévistre recalls a motorcycle cutting in front of the Mercedes and a flash of light, possibly from a camera, causing the car carrying Diana and Dodi to crash. The police could not support this account. Sabine Dauzonne saw a white Fiat Uno come out of the tunnel shortly after the crash. He noticed the Paris license plates and, more importantly, a tanned driver, a muzzled dog in the back, and the car’s broken tail light. The then head of the Brigade Criminelle, Martine Monteil, found white paint from another car in the wreck of the Mercedes and, on the tarmac nearby, pieces of broken taillights and, even more curiously, pearls that Diana was supposed to have worn as she was. hastened to her death. Nothing is final. Hilary Mantel once wrote: “The princess we invented to fill a vacancy bore no relation to any real person.” A quarter of a century after her death, we are still filling that void, filling it with speculation and the illusive prospect of closure. Jessop and Peel cleverly end the first episode with the sole survivor of the Mercedes, bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, walking out of hospital five weeks after the crash. Maybe he could solve all these questions about the death of the princess once and for all. Probably not, but that’s the possibility that puts us back to watch the second episode. I wonder how we will commemorate the 50th anniversary of her death?
