Orlando (1993)

Breathtaking and practically nondiscursive, Sally Potter's audacious Orlando overcomes some dodgy performances and a narrative structure that could most generously be described as "loose" to emerge as a haunting, discussion-provoking trans-historical and transsexual drama. Commanded never to age by Queen Elizabeth (played with surprisingly little camp by legendary cross-dresser Quentin Crisp), the title character becomes immortal; we then follow Orlando through 400 years of dreamlike British history. Midway through the film, Orlando changes genders--to Potter's immense credit, the transformation is handled with little fanfare and no explanation. Tilda Swinton, in the lead role, is far more convincing as a woman than as a man, and even during the film's latter half, her impassivity and lack of expression can be annoying. Potter encourages Swinton to play to the camera, and the resulting asides and glances askance can be amusing, but often seem purposeless, or even arch. Nevertheless, the willful idiosyncrasy and understatement of the film never quite capsize the project, and once you give yourself over to the filmmaker's logic, the panoramic sweep of the cinematography (remarkable sets include an aristocratic skating party on the frozen Thames during the Great London Frost of 1603, a stunning tent-caravan in Central Asia, and countless fastidious boudoirs and interiors) will surely keep you enraptured. Orlando is no Merchant-Ivory production, no prissy, forgettable period piece; this film has teeth, and it may bite ferociously when you least expect it to. Based on, but scarcely resembling, the Virginia Woolf modernist classic of the same name. --Miles Bethany Amazon.com

"The very fabric of life was magic."

In her most playful and exuberant novel, Virginia Woolf writes the "historical biography" of Orlando, a young boy of nobility during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. A wild ride through four centuries, the novel shows Orlando aging, magically, only thirty-six years between 1588 and 1928. Even more magically, he also changes from a man to a woman. As she explores Orlando's life, Woolf also explores the differing roles of men and women in society during various periods, ultimately concluding that one's role as a man or woman is determined by society, rather than by birth.

From the Elizabethan period, during which Orlando works as a steward for the queen and also serves as her lover, he progresses to the reign of James I, experiencing a profound love for a Russian princess, Sasha, who is herself exploring the role of a man. An interlude in which he is wooed by the Archduchess Harriet/Archduke Harry leads to his ambassadorship to Constantinople, a period spent with the gypsies, and his eventual return to England--as a woman. New experiences and observations await her there.

Throughout the novel, Woolf matches her prose style to the literary style of the period in which Orlando lives, creating always-changing moods and sheer delight for the reader. Some constants continue throughout the four centuries of Orlando's life. Orlando is always a writer, always recording his thoughts, and always adding to a poem he has begun as a child entitled "The Oak Tree." He is always returning to his 365-room house whenever he needs to recuperate from his experiences, and some characters repeat through time.

Literary historians make much of the fact that Woolf modeled Orlando on Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's lover, and that this study of gender roles was an early exploration of lesbianism, bisexuality, cross-dressing, and transgender identities. The novel is pure fun to read, however, and though it raises serious and thoughtful questions about sexuality and the ways that it controls our lives, there is no sense that Woolf wrote the novel specifically to make a public statement or prove a point. Her themes of gender and its relation to social expectations, of imagination and its relation to reality, of the importance of history in our lives, and of the unlimited potential of all humans, regardless of their sex, transcend the specific circumstances under which Woolf may have written the book. A playful and delightful novel, which broke new ground with its publication. Mary Whipple

Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated)
A Room of One's Own (Annotated)
To the Lighthouse
Jacob's Room
Moments of Being


July 15, 2008

Gender

This film, while very strange and yet good, shows gender dichotomies in a very creative and fresh way. It is an art film. July 10, 2008

Orlando

I thoroughly enjoyed this film. A wonderful philosophical journey through a life filled with discovery. February 29, 2008

Amazing...

I've watched this movie a few times now, and now it's on my shelf...
Visually stunning, poetic, erotic, mesmerasing movie... February 19, 2008

A Thinking Person's Fantasy

Director Sally Potter's fondly embraceable, slightly over-elaborate big screen version of Virginia Woolf's famously psychedelic tale is a moving study in the power of understatement, and a testimony to how even the most justified taking of print-to-screen liberties may sometimes come back to nip its creator. In giving the androgynous-looking Tilda Swinton (probably best known to US audiences as the White Witch in the recent Narnia adaptation) the starring role as a striking young Elizabethan lad who literally carries out his venerable Queen's command that he not age or wither, and thusly lives through the next four centuries first as a man, later after a metamorphosis as a woman, the makers of this motion picture chose well. As Orlando travels through the decades and centuries, he experiences many things. He falls in love with a fickle Russian noblewoman who is visiting the court of King James I during a winter of deadly cold; he tries his hand at poetry-writing under the guidance of a seventeenth-century con-man; the one-time male makes his entrance in the decadent eighteenth-century as a female, and reaps the consequences of this bodily change. She, Orlando, goes on to spill unexpectedly in love again in Victorian times, endures pregnant during the chaos of World War One, and finally faces a tragically unfair legal confrontation in modern times that undermines even the era-spanning authority of England's greatest queen. The film Orlando is as I said fantasy for thinkers. It sketches its story on the canvas of British history, distant and modern, and if to be dubbed unique is the high praise, then it warrants the highest praise that can be given. September 8, 2007

More reviews at Amazon.com ...