Sally Potter’s gender-bending fantasy Orlando skips through time, just as her age-defying adventurer morphs from hero to heroine, from shy young aristo to motorbiking mother. It’s a radical fairy tale of a film that balks at logic and basks in beauty, sensation and luscious locations.
Based on the novel ‘Orlando: A Biography’ by Virginia Woolf, Potter’s adaptation is thoroughly, irreverently modern but at the same time passionately infatuated with each of its periods and places. It features direct address, Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I and Jimmy Somerville as a court singer and guardian angel.
Orlando is divided into eras and the following chapters: Death; Love; Poetry; Politics; Society; Sex; and Birth. It begins in 1600 and ends in the present day. As the film opens, in the Elizabethan period, our narrator tells us sadly “when Orlando was born it wasn’t privilege he sought but company.” Furthermore, we are told that our protagonist is fortunate enough to possess the fine feminine features which ironically make him a great male beauty of the time (he should do, he is played after all by Tilda Swinton).
Orlando quickly becomes the favourite of a terrifically old Queen Elizabeth I (the aforementioned Quentin Crisp, in a stroke of casting genius) who lures him devilishly to her boudoir one evening and bestows him with property, on one condition: “do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old.” Her words that night seem to cast a spell on Orlando and we realise soon after that he is indeed immortal.
Later episodes involve Orlando falling in love with the ravishing Sasha (Charlotte Valandrey), the daughter of a Russian Ambassador, getting his heart broken and taking to his bed for a week before offering patronage to a grasping, embittered poet. When he is sent to Constantinople in 1700 as a British Ambassador, he gets drawn into a conflict (though demonstrates little appetite for violence) and then – one fine morning – he wakes to discover that he is now a woman.
Orlando was a tough sell which took Potter and her production team years to raise the finances for. She describes her approach to adapting Woolf’s iconic work as “ruthless and meticulous”; in order to unearth the essence of the book she was unafraid to make significant changes and “bring it to 1992 and beyond”.
As our hero/heroine, Tilda Swinton has the kind of androgynous beauty which means she is believable and striking as both sexes. It’s a unique, charismatic performance and remains one of her most sensational roles to date. It’s also easy to understand how Swinton was the only possible choice; the casting decision took place four years before Orlando made it to the screen.
Orlando is bold, joyfully liberated and magical. It wittily and resonantly throws off the shackles of gender norms and conventional storytelling. It’s a film which at one point features a Heathcliff-esque Billy Zane emerging spectacularly from some fog but, surprisingly, is none the worse for it.
Cult Film Club – Orlando (text) by Emma Simmonds is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
And I thought I was the siesnble one. Thanks for setting me straight.
Written by Jayce on May 20th, 2011 at 05:46