DHAKA: 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.

The British tabloids, who followed every twist and turn from Diana’s 1981 marriage to Prince Charles, to their divorce and her death in a 1997 Paris car crash, were scathing about the film from German director Oliver Hirschbiegel.

‘The Queen of Hearts has been recast as a sad-sack singleton that even Bridget Jones would cross the street to avoid,’ wrote the Mirror’s David Edwards in a one-star review dubbing the film a ‘cheap and cheerless effort’, reports gulfnews.com.

The movie is based on ‘Diana: Her Last Love’, a book by author Kate Snell published in 2000, which argues that the estranged wife of the heir to the British throne had a clandestine affair with Khan in the last two years of her life.

BDST: 1624 HRS, SEPT 08, 2013
RoR/Jck