Without fail, every time I take my 130 lb Saint Bernard out into public, a spectacle happens. We’re stopped in the street, cat-called (dog-called?) by passing cars, and cause a bit of chaos wherever we go. Most people act as if they’ve just seen a celebrity when they first lay eyes on her. Inevitably, after the initial high-pitched hellos and gasps of disbelief quiet down, the question is asked: what’s his name?

Her name is Orlando and the reveal of this information always yields an interesting response. I’ve been surprised over the last three years by how often people respond with, “Oh, like the Virginia Woolf book?” Of course, there’s a fair amount of “Like Florida?” responses as well, but anytime someone connects the ultra-sensitive gender-switching debonair of Woolf’s creation and my rather masculine-looking female dog, I feel a general sense of vindication on behalf of both Woolf and myself.

Orlando (1992), Sally Potter’s adaptation of Woolf’s book of the same name, stars Tilda Swinton in a sumptuous historical romp that similarly acts as a litmus test for the mutability of gender. The story follows a beautiful poetry-obsessed youth with lofty ideals for a life filled with love and his transition over the course of nearly four hundred years to a self-assured woman who finds meaning and comfort in the multitude of selves that make up her identity.

The movie’s eponymous protagonist spends the first half of the film as a lovesick male youth who—both remarkably and rather unremarkably—wakes up one morning to find her body is now female. However disruptive or explosive this event sounds, it’s really not a matter of much importance to the character or the film itself. It’s simply something that happens and which Orlando remarks on with a satisfied smirk and a glance into the camera: “Same person, no difference at all.”

Did I mention Orlando is also immortal? That’s also something that just sort of happens in both the film and novel.

The fantastical story is something of an oddity among Woolf’s grounded bibliography, but its existence has given us an understanding of her nuanced sexuality which, by all accounts, was quite queer. The character Orlando is generally understood to be an exaggerated depiction of Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s world-traveling lover who—much like the title character upon waking as a woman one morning—was denied ownership of her beloved family estate due to her gender. Orlando, the novel, is the result of the immense heartbreak and humiliation Woolf felt upon Sackville-West leaving her for another woman. Combining fantastical fiction with true biographical details, Woolf exacts her immortal revenge on Sackville-West by creating a link between the two of them that can now never be undone.

Luckily for us, Woolf did not just write Orlando as a story to humiliate and expose Sackville-West to the world as a love-obsessed womanizer. To Woolf’s credit, her novel uses Sackville-West’s life as a way of examining both the freedoms and oppressions that gender allows us as well as the fusion of disparate parts that make up the whole of a person. It’s a story of multiple dualities beyond male and female: love/hate, treachery/loyalty, and fiction/fact. Or, perhaps more precisely: history/fantasy.

Orlando was for many years considered to be unfilmable due to its various fantastical plot points, including the four-hundred-year span of the story and the requirement of an actor who could reasonably portray the character as male, female, and a carefully constructed in-between. Potter’s vision for this film is precise and its narrative success hinges on a strict structure where Orlando’s life is told in chapters arranged by the year and the character’s current obsession and most potent identity marker. We start the film with “1600, Death” which introduces the title character amidst the death of both Queen Elizabeth I and his father, and go on to encounter “1650, Poetry”, “1700, Politics”, “1850, Sex” and a few others until we reach the dateless “Birth.”

This structure helps frame the film like a series of glimpses into Orlando’s mind. Coupled with the choice to have Orlando speak directly to the camera at points, it often feels like we’re experiencing the character’s life after the fact—as though Orlando has taken us by the hand, dragged us on stage, and reenacted the scenes for our enjoyment.

There’s a consistency of the visual tone in the film where, despite new color palettes arriving with each change of location, most scenes seem to drift gently into the next. The camera produces a haziness that’s contrasted by the flamboyance of the set and the costumes, both of which are decorated with endless accouterments. Soft washes of pale pink, foggy ice blues, and muted warm garden tones of orange and green follow the protagonist from English gardens, sunless days around a frozen lake, a Turkish palace, and eventually the cool steel office parks of contemporary England. Both this and the gentle pacing of the script give the film a reminiscence of Baroque-era paintings.

One of the film's most memorable shots arranges Orlando and his current obsession, the Russian ambassador’s daughter Sasha (Charlotte Valandrey), with her in the left midground gazing up at a slight angle toward Orlando while he (at the time) is in the foreground looking down in thought. There’s such a pleasing angle to the V-shaped arrangement of their bodies and the angle of their gazes that immediately brings to mind the way Baroque painter Caravaggio often arranged his figures.

Potter’s framing is so intentional and her attention to detail so minute as to focus on a wave of floating dust mites coming in from a window during the morning of Orlando’s transition to her new female form. Potter treats the change as a sacred occurrence heralded by an angelic choir and gauzy swaths of light breaking into the darkness of Orlando’s bedroom. Splashing water on her face upon waking, the character engages in a literal self-baptism that marks her entry into the world in her new form. Orlando then gazes at her reflection in a full length mirror and for the first time we see her without the accouterments that supposedly mark her gender. Throughout the film, the wigs, corsets, and Elizabethan collars give us cues as to what Orlando is, as opposed to who. In this scene, stripped of all of those accouterments, Orlando’s identity transcends the limitations of gender and settles into pure personhood.

There is an infectious lightness to the film borne from the story’s matter-of-fact presentation of Orlando’s journey from one stroke of gender to another as both enormous, inevitable, and yet completely unexceptional. To live with Orlando in this universe, however briefly, is a breath of sugar-coated air for those of us who cannot subscribe so strictly to the wriggling certainties of “male” and “female”. It is a world imagined first by Woolf, then brought before us on a gleaming silver platter by Potter with an invitation to dive in and breathe deep.

And if you see me and my dog around town, don’t worry, you don’t have to ask. She’ll be more than happy to sign your paperback or DVD copy of Orlando.

One Stroke of Gender to Another: Orlando