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ORLANDO
Rating:  ½
UK/Russia/France/Italy/Netherlands. 1993.
Director/Screenplay – Sally Potter, Based on the Novel by Virginia Woolf, Producer – Christopher Sheppard, Photography – Alexei Rodinov, Music – Sally Potter, David Bedford, Fred Frith & David Motion, Music Supervisor – Bob Last, Special Effects – Yury Borovkov, Paul Corbould & Viktor Okovitey, Production Design – Jan Roelfs & Ben Van Os. Production Company – Adventure Pictures (Orlando) Ltd/Lenfilm/Rio/Mikado Film/Sigma Filmproductions/British Screen.
Cast:
Tilda Swinton (Orlando), Billy Zane (Shelmerdine), Charlotte Valandery (Alexandra ‘Sasha’ Menchegora), Lothaire Bluteau (The Khan), John Wood (Archduke Harry), Heathcote Williams (Nick Greene/Publisher), Quentin Crisp (Queen Elizabeth I)
Plot: In 1600 the youthful Orlando is presented to the court of Elizabeth I where he rapidly becomes Elizabeth’s favourite and is ordered, before she dies, to never grow old. Through the ages Orlando experiences love, loss and adventure – always going to sleep and waking up in another age. In 1750 Orlando changes gender and becomes a woman, something which causes consternation to the society of the time which tries to seize her property. Eventually in the 20th Century she writes her autobiography and concludes that she has found a time when she is welcome.
This adaption of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel is quite a joy. The central premise is conducted with considerable amusement. Sally Potter plays the time travel and sex change aspects of the story with a charmingly nonchalant deadpan – “I was four hundred years old and had hardly ever aged a day, but being England nobody ever said anything” – the character delightfully
concludes at the end. It becomes apparent that the character of Orlando is meant to stand in for the spirit of woman and women’s changing role throughout history – from being treated as mere chattel in the 18th Century to the florid Romanticism of the Victorian era to finally finding liberation in the present day (represented by the chintzily surreal image of Swinton sitting in a field as singer Jimmi Sommerville flies above with plaster angel wings singing the celebratory I am Coming in his inhuman castrato voice).
Swinton never really convinces us she ever is a man, but she nevertheless plays with a wry self-mocking innocence which proves a central strength to the film. Indeed with a performer of any less strength the film would be far hollower. As it is it is terribly uneven in places. What one does remember about it is the odd witty line and various humorous vignettes – the highly amusing meeting with Jonathan Swift and Dr Johnson who pompously lecture on the place of women in society; the lawyers’ attempts to make sense of her sex change and time hopping; John Wood’s proposal; the sequence with the freeloading poet played by Heathcote Williams. A number of other sequences don’t quite make it – one with her running pregnant across a WWI battlefield is so brief it seems an entire sequence has been truncated. Nevertheless the film’s constant good humour and Swinton’s joyfully illuminated performance carries the film over its rough spots.
The casting is almost as eccentric as the film – particularly memorable is Quentin Crisp’s turn as Queen Elizabeth I. (When one realizes that one scene has the male Crisp, playing a woman, kissing the female Swinton, playing a man, one sees just how eccentric Potter’s games of sexual identity swapping becomes). The sets are particularly sumptuously dressed – the spirit of Peter Greenaway consciously hangs over the film, with Potter even having employed Greenaway’s production designers, Ben Van Os and Jan Roelfs.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1993
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