"Witty, Pretty, Bold, A Real She-Man"
TAKING Virginia Woolf's bountiful and witty 1928 novel, "Orlando," which is as much about words, writing and the dogged pursuit of fine literature as about a number of other things, Sally Potter has made a grand new movie that is as much a richly informed appreciation of the novel as it is a free adaptation.
This ravishing and witty spectacle invades the mind through eyes that are dazzled without ever being anesthetized. Throughout Ms. Potter's "Orlando," as in Woolf's, there are a piercing kind of common sense and a joy that, because they are so rare these days in any medium, create their own kind of cinematic suspense and delightedly surprised laughter. "Orlando" could well become a classic of a very special kind, not mainstream perhaps, but a model for independent film makers who follow their own irrational muses, sometimes to un-mourned obscurity, occasionally to glory.
"Same person, no difference at all. Just a different sex. "
Orlando (Tilda Swinton), the hero, a beautiful young nobleman who was earlier adored by the aging Queen Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp), goes to sleep one night in the 17th century, only to wake up five days later as the heroine. It's no great shock to Orlando. She turns to the camera (as she does from time to time throughout the film) and says tersely: "Same person, no difference at all. Just a different sex."
Orlando, her curiosity undiminished, goes on learning about life through the centuries up into our own, at which point she is somewhere in her late 30's. In one of her last appearances, the woman (about whom Queen Elizabeth once said, according to Woolf, "I know a man when I see one") is shown helmeted and goggled, driving across the English landscape on a motorcycle, her small daughter bouncing happily in the sidecar.Between the reign of Elizabeth I, when she was a boy, and the 20th century, when motherhood more or less happens to her, Orlando enjoys a serene immortality doing what she chooses. She ponders the differences between men and women and, from her own privileged vantage point, discovers their similarities.
She pursues a poet's career, only to be ridiculed in the 16th century, fawned upon in the 19th and asked to do rewrites in the 20th. While still a man, Orlando falls in love with the gorgeous Sasha (Charlotte Valandrey), a mysterious and wanton Moscovite princess in London at the time of the Great Frost of 1603. As a woman she falls in love with the handsome Shelmerdine (Billy Zane), an idealized American with whom she has a more enduring, if less sexually demanding, relationship. Sometimes it's not always easy to tell exactly where Orlando is in time, but then she has the same problem.
Time keeps flying by even at those moments when it seems to creep for Orlando, as when she finds herself guiltily bored in an 18th-century London drawing room surrounded by Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison and other wits of the day. She darts into a fine old English maze in the 18th century and emerges a few moments later in the 19th century when Queen Victoria is in Buckingham Palace.
In such ways does Ms. Potter, who wrote the screenplay and directed the film, make the same kind of breathtaking, utterly rational leaps in time and place that Woolf does in prose. She also rediscovers the timelessness and profoundly comic density of the novel that, when it was published in 1928, critics were inclined to describe as "not one of her more serious works."
This was perhaps because "Orlando" was interpreted as being so much influenced by Woolf's love for the flamboyant Vita Sackville-West. Woolf's male-female Orlando was inspired by the aristocratic Sackville-West who, like Orlando, was a writer who worshipped the idea of great literary reputation while finding only fame. Yet the novel can be seen today to far outclass such gossipy and now almost totally irrelevant associations. It's a major work by a first-class literary mind and technician.
The novel stands on its own. Whether or not the film does, I'm not sure. If you've read the book, it's impossible not to recall it while watching the film, either through the ways Ms. Potter recreates sequences and images from the book, or through the ways she finds equivalents and, occasionally, through the ways in which she goes off on her own recognizance. This is a movie that may well require a preset point of view. I suspect, though, that it's a movie that will prompt a lot of people to read Woolf for the first time, which can't be at all bad.
Ms. Potter's achievement is in translating to film something of the breadth of Woolf's remarkable range of interests, not only in language and literature, but also in history, nature, weather, animals, the relation of the sexes and the very nature of the sexes. The book is feminist, but also much more. The movie, photographed by Aleksei Rodionov, directly and magnificently reflects Woolf's concern for the look of things, which, in prose, must be described in inexact if evocative words, and in similes and metaphors that refer to something other.
The movie is a visual trip, from the opening sequences showing Orlando's first encounter with Queen Elizabeth, through his tour of duty as a dreamy British ambassador to a magical Constantinople, and through all of the later sequences in which Orlando must look at the world through the eyes of a woman. Old Queen Bess clutches the youth to her breast with gnarled hands and filthy fingernails, commanding: "Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old."
Equally vivid on the screen is the novel's initial tour de force, the description of the Great Frost of 1603, when the Thames froze and London moved onto the ice for what amounted to an impromptu fair. It's at a grand dinner party in a tent on the ice, the waiters wearing skates, that Orlando first meets Sasha, who loves him treacherously. Orlando moves effortlessly through the ages, through countries, through fashions, from passionate bewilderment to calm enlightenment.
As important to the film's success as anything else are the bewitching face, figure and screen presence of Ms. Swinton who, with her red hair, deeply set eyes and self-assured expression, looks remarkably like portraits of the young Queen Elizabeth I. She has a sweetness, gravity and intelligence about her that make the more bizarre events appear to be completely normal. Before Orlando becomes a woman, Ms. Swinton is an exceptionally pretty youth, but never an effeminate one. This could be the beginning of a major international career for the English actress.
The film's ge
nder-bending scheme is elegantly realized in Mr. Cris
p's performance as the virgin queen, a stiff, arthritic old lady who can still appreciate the look of a nicely turned, youthful calf while reaching for the thigh. John Wood is very funny as the Archduke Harry, who lusts after Orlando through time, and Heathcote Williams is hilarious as a scroungy Elizabethan poet, who tells nasty tales about his better-known colleagues. Ms. Valandrey, a French actress, is missed when Sasha leaves the story. Mr. Zane (Shelmerdine) is almost as beautiful as Ms. Swinton. That sort of thing works for "Orlando." More than anything else, though, "Orlando" is Ms. Swinton's triumph. With the firmest but lightest of touches, she has spun gossamer. ~ Vincent Canby, New York Times
Web: Cast, Bios and Additional Details at IMDb
Director: Sally Potter
Writers: Sally Potter(writer) & Virginia Woolf (novel)
Cast, Crew & Credits: Full Cast, Crew & Credits
Genre: Drama-Romance
Runtime: 93 min
Awards: Nominated for 2 Oscars. Another 11 wins & 4 nominations
Spoken Language: English
Preview Clip 'Orlando'
Download Film Files: 'Orlando'
| Method 1.) File Self Extraction. (For PC) Download files into the same folder. then click on the 'xxxx.part01.exe' file and the film will self extract. (For Mac) You will need a Command Line Archiver like Rar for Mac OS X' |
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