Film Notes: Orlando

Come see Orlando with us at the Paramount Theatre on Tuesday, July 25. Tickets here.

More than three decades after its release, ORLANDO still feels timeless. This is, of course, because Orlando is timeless, a character existing beyond the confines of the laws of nature, beyond the constructs of time and gender. At the start of the film, Queen Elizabeth I gifts the young nobleman ownership of land and a castle, ad infinitum, so long as he obeys her command: “Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old.” Accordingly, he moves through eras until waking in the early 18th century as a woman–and then continues her course through history.

This turn is one of the key elements that maintains ORLANDO’s relevance: the unexpected gender change is received with little more than a shrug. Orlando takes in her new feminine form and reassures the audience, “Same person. No difference at all, just a different sex.” Both Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel and Sally Potter’s 1992 film adaptation have been the subject of myriad conversations on gender fluidity, heteronormativity, and feminism. Woolf’s novel is inspired by the aristocratic family history of Vita Sackville-West, whom she had a decade-long relationship with. Sackville-West was queer, describing herself as having two sides to her personality, comfortably vacillating between masculinity and femininity. With what Sackville-West’s son described as “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature,” Woolf hyperbolizes her lover’s gender fluidity, giving it a literal form. This ambivalence toward the binary is echoed by Potter in a 1993 interview with Walter Donohue in BFI’s Sight and Sound: “The more I… tried to write a character who was both male and female, the more ludicrous maleness and femaleness became and the more the notion of the essential human being–that a man and woman both are–predominated.”

While there have been theatrical adaptations before and since, Potter’s screenplay is unique in its ambitious vision. Despite being told it was “unmakeable,” and after seven years of pre-production, the film was released to overall positive reception, such as this from Caryn James’ New York Times review: “The film ORLANDO… belongs to Sally Potter at least as much as to Virginia Woolf. In this elegant, stylized adaptation, Ms. Potter takes a huge, audacious, and necessary leap away from the page.” Every element of the film is crafted with intention, from her contributions to the music compositions and costume design to her collaboration with cinematographer Aleksy Rodinov to her brilliant casting of Tilda Swinton in the titular role, perhaps the only actor capable of embodying such an enigmatic, ageless existence.

The film stands alone as a feast of beauty, a work of visual poetry. Even still, Potter’s reverence for the novel is evident in the way she, as Matthew Connelly writes for Slant, “leans in, listens close, and invites us to savor the pageant of ideas and images she alternately channels and constructs.” Just like Orlando the character, ORLANDO endures as a cinematic masterpiece. Even more so, though, with the current politicization of gender identity, ORLANDO is an essential text of queer theory and an example of how each element of our selfhood is changeable, a demonstration of how a freedom of spirit allows for the indulgence of endless earthly delights.