A four-century gender-bender

Orlando

Directed and written by Sally Potter

Based on Virginia Woolf's novel

Starring Tilda Swinton, Billy Zane, John Wood, Lothaire Bluteau, Charlotte Valandrey, Quentin Crisp

Reviewed by Ulrike Erhardt

This is the most interesting film I have seen this year because of its gender confusion. The story was written by Virginia Woolf, who had a predominantly "mental thing, a spiritual thing", with Via Sackville-West, a relationship which lasted for 20 years.

Via had grown up at Knole, a vast estate, almost a palace, which had been granted to her family by Queen Elizabeth I. As a girl, she could never inherit it.

This situation is magnified in the story of Orlando, a young nobleman who charms Queen Elizabeth I into granting him the deed to his parents' ancestral home — but on one condition: "Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old", she tells him.

Tilda Swinton plays Orlando, an Elizabethan aristocrat whose life spans 400 years in the quest for "life and a lover". She has an incredible screen presence that manages deliciously to deal with maleness and femaleness: Orlando changes his gender.

At first he is a man, seeking to fulfil his duties by providing himself with a wife and heirs, on encountering true love in the form of a visiting Russian princess. When she doesn't reciprocate his feelings, neither a mental escape into writing poetry nor a physical departure (taking on a 10-year ambassadorship in central Asia) can heal his wounds.

On trying to help his friend Khan in war, when kill or be killed becomes the question, Orlando opts out and has a sex change.

As a woman, Orlando returns to the formal salons of 18th-century London and faces once again the choice of marrying or losing everything. When Orlando finally meets the man of her dreams and is asked to abandon

her own path to follow him, she rejects him and loses her property.

Orlando emerges into the present, bringing all her accumulated knowledge onto paper. Even though she isn't understood by her publisher, she finds herself. But she continuous to have occasional bouts of melancholia, expressing her secret yearnings for companionship. But that's not where the similarities to Virginia Woolf's life end.

It took another Virginia (Potter) to bring to the screen this story, which has fascinated her since age 15. In striking images she extracts the essence of each period of history and then exaggerates it with good humour. She also makes us laugh because there is so much resonance with our own lives.

Orlando doesn't force us to make choices, because here the other half is the other side of the same coin.

From GLW issue 101