LONDON — Film critics have savaged a new movie of the late British Princess Diana's relationship with a Pakistani doctor as an intrusive and embarrassingly cheap soap opera. British-born Australian actress Naomi Watts plays the jilted princess trapped in a gilded cage. English actor Naveen Andrews is heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, who gives her the love she craves in "Diana", which held its world premiere in London on Thursday. "Diana" focuses on the vignettes of their assignations in hospitals, cars, his flat and Kensington Palace, interspersed with the public Diana campaigning against landmines and giving her infamous 1995 interview about her relationship with Charles in which she said there were "three of us in this marriage". The real-life Hasnat Khan vowed in August he would never watch the film, saying it is all based on hypotheses and gossip. Watts told Reuters from a thinly attended red carpet that she was concerned about what Diana's sons, Princes William and Harry, might think of the film if they were to see it. "If they do I hope they feel that we have been respectful and upheld her memories in the best possible way," she told Reuters Television. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw's review was a lot less lofty. "The awful truth is that, 16 years after that terrible day in 1997, Diana has died another awful death." — Reuters
