Orlando

Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel - a long, passionate and charming love-letter to Vita Sackville-West - concerns history and sexuality, time and gender, hermaphroditism and immortality. It tells the story of Orlando (Tilda Swinton), a young aristocrat who in 1600 is granted the deeds of his parents' house by an elderly Elizabeth I. He falls in love with a Russian princess but is rejected. In 1650 he decides to become a poet, by 1700 he has been made a diplomat in Central Asia: caught up in a war he avoids having to fight by waking up one morning as a woman ("Same person: different sex"). In 1750 back in England, Lady Orlando is told that she cannot hold property as she is a) legally dead and b) female - "which amounts to the same thing". 100 years later she falls in love again and in the war-torn 20th century finds herself pregnant. In the present day she has a daughter and a finished manuscript charting her story.

Sally Potter's gorgeous, sumptuous film has a European flavour, not just in its financing: the sound crew were French, the camera crew were Russian, and the production designers came from Holland, but essentially this film's concerns are with Englishness, and the English addiction to the past. It is also full of jokes about the English, from their habit of talking loudly to visitors to their habit of collecting other countries.

The film is a visual feast, a richly textured, colour-coded spectacle. The Elizabethan age is full of golds and reds, the age of James is grey and silver, and the 18th century is full of pastel blues.

It is a clever irony that the fashions of the 16th and 17th centuries create a feminised male Orlando. another beautiful irony is the casting of Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth. Most important of all, Tilda Swinton is an acting revelation, perfectly capturing Woolf's notion of an essential self that lies beyond gender.

Review by Stephen Cox
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96