Pointing the finger for Diana’s death
A MAN with a mission is how Mohammed Al Fayed sees himself — a mission to have his son’s untimely death officially recognised as an assassination and to have that murder avenged in court.
He has thus far failed in the British courts, so he has taken to the ‘court of public opinion’ to try again.
It is 14 years since Al Fayed’s son, Dodi and his girlfriend (and possibly fiancée), Princess Diana, were killed in a car crash in Paris, and since then there have been conspiracy theories galore. An inquest in the Courts of Royal Justice a decadeafter the tragedy failed to fully vanquish the rumour mill.
The 2008 inquest ruled thatDiana, who would have been 50 today had she lived, and Dodi Fayed were unlawfully killed — but their deaths were blamed on their driver, Henri Paul, who also died in the crash, and on the paparazzi who were in full baying pursuit of the couple’s car.
Al Fayed has now backed a new documentary film, (so it is clearly never going to be an impartial examination of the facts), about what he sees as the racist motivation behind the killing of Diana and Dodi.
The film is titled Unlawful Killing and was directed by actor Keith Allen, father of pop singer Lily Allen. Al Fayed funded the €2.4 million film production himself and it’s to be publicly screened for the first time at the Galway Film Fleadh on July 6. However, it won’t be shown in Britain because it is too libellous — it would have needed a number of cuts to comply with British libel laws.
Conor Nolan, spokesman for the film production company, Allied Stars, said: “Our own lawyers have advised we would have needed to make 87 different cuts to comply with laws of libel, defamation and contempt of court, and we didn’t want to sacrifice the creative integrity of the documentary so we haven’t made those cuts thus far.”
This legal minefield is very clearly summed up by Al Fayed himself when he says: “There was a clear verdict of unlawful killing, so why has nobody been arrested? What is at the core of all this is racism. Powerful people in this country, my country, don’t want to hear me talking about Prince Philip’s Nazi background, but I have to, because it is 100% true. They wouldn’t accept me or my son, and when he fell in love with Diana, they murdered him.”
“Basically Mr Al Fayed feels that the royal family didn’t want the bloodline sullied by a Muslim — and a Muslim with dark skin at that,” explains Nolan.
In one scene in the film the Queen is called a “gangster in a tiara” and Prince Philip is labelled a “Fred West-style psychopath.”
The voiceover describes Diana as ‘a woman who writes a letter predicting her death in a car crash which then happened four years later’ and calls it murder.
The trailer voiceover also says: “The British Establishment think that they have got away with murder. But then, what’s new? They’ve been getting away with murder for centuries.”
For any parent, the idea of a father openly talking about his love for, and grief at the loss of, a son as well as working tirelessly to have him remembered, resonates. Al Fayad’s refusal to back down in the face of official condemnation has to appeal to the rebel in so many of us. And any of us who remember — or saw the film and documentaries about — The Birmingham Six or the Guildford Four, must surely be aware of huge miscarriages of British justice.
“The people lost a princess when Diana died but a father also lost a son and he is still grieving,” said Mr Nolan.
So might Al Fayed get the ground swell of support he craves here in Ireland? The Queen was visiting Ireland when the film’s outing at the Cannes Film Festival took place — it was shown to a private viewing. And judging by the reception for the Queen, the jury’s out.
Some critics have described it as ‘balderdash’ and ‘high twaddle’ and the review in the Hollywood Reporter was scathing: “This scattergun film should only backfire on the conspiracy theorists that cling to the notion that speeding through a Parisian tunnel with a drunken driver at the wheel is not a plausible cause of death. If the Monty Python troupe ever wanted to lampoon conspiracy-theory filmmakers, it would be hard to top this one.”
And Screendaily.com describes Unlawful Killing as “a poorly-made hodge-podge of cracker-jack theories fronted by expert witnesses of debatable calibre: it’s a wail of grievance from a parent still pointing the finger in every direction.”
The reviews weren’t all bad however — not according to Mr Nolan: “In their usual way the British media, especially certain sectors, gave it a kicking. But the international press considered it very praiseworthy. Any documentary or film of this nature — consider Fahrenheit 9/11 or Bowling for Columbine — is bound to divide people’s opinions.”
It does sound as if this film might alienate more people than it will convince: the theory, briefly, of Unlawful Killing is that the press were involved in a cover-up because the press is always pro-establishment; the driver was a member of French secret police who colluded in the murders; Christians didn’t want their beautiful princess impregnated by a Muslim, someone ‘got to’ the medical officials etc etc.
And even ardent Diana fans might find it hard to look at a close-up photo of Diana taken just moments after the 1997 crash in Paris.
Director Keith Allen defends the use of that particular image: “The photo is not used in the film for the purpose of shock. It is included as evidence, because it shows clearly that, although Diana had been injured in the crash, she was alert and very much alive. I repeat: it is not a picture of a dying woman.”
He insists there is something “extremely fishy about what happened in the Alma tunnel in 1997 and in the Royal Courts of justice a decade later”. This is Allen’s first outing as a documentary film maker and his involvement arose because he wanted to expose a conspiracy, says Nolan.
Steven Spielberg has seen Unlawful Killing, he says, and has a high opinion of it and while it hasn’t been certified in Ireland or Britain, Mr Nolan expects it to be more suited to a more mature audience — teens upwards, he says. “We feel it is time for the general public to see this film and to make up their own minds.”
We have always had a fondness for the underdog in Ireland and a certain proportion of people will always be ready to believe the worst about the establishment, or, in particular, the British establishment.
However, whether a man with a personal wealth understood to be in the region of $1.2 billion can be viewed as an underdog — even a man grieving the untimely loss of a beloved son — is up to the audience to decide next week.
