Orlando (1993)

A Surprisingly Unforgettable Movie!

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

I didn't know anything about Sally Potter's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel when I rented it, and that made "Orlando" even more of a treat. In a way, it predicted the era when gender definitions would be less defined, as Tilda Swinton's title character undergoes a significant change over the course of the movie. The changes that the eternally young Orlando personally experiences are as significant as those in society over the centuries.I wouldn't call it one of the greatest movies ever made, but I like how it shows the protagonist accepting who she is. Were "Orlando" more famous, it might now be an iconic movie among the people who don't conform to the gender binary spectrum.Anyway, it's a fine piece of work. A particularly impressive scene is Orlando running through a room full of works of art, having to move her dress from side to side to avoid hitting them. Those dresses must have been a pain to wear.Also starring Billy Zane (Titanic), John Wood (WarGames) and Toby Stephens (Die Another Day).

"Orlando" is a truly magnificent book, and this is a magnificent adaptation of a magnificent book. When I was at the Women's Studies, there was a whole course dedicated exclusively to Virginia Woolf. We had an 'expert' professor who told us that "Virginia Woolf went away from religion." I imagined Virginia in a boat, rowing forever into the sunset. It sounded exciting, but I wanted to know what happened next, or how do we see it in her work. I never got an answer. After reading "Orlando" myself, I dismissed the professor's notion as her own fabrication. To me, "Orlando" is a myth, a folktale, and folktales come from religion. It just happened that at the same time when I was reading "Orlando", I found Vladimir Propp's "Morphology of the Folk Tale" on my landlord's book shelf, went downstairs to buy some chips and mineral water and bought Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm (2005) DVD in the store. So, I had an epiphany. "Orlando" has a folktale pattern, where the hero transforms and adopts female attributes in order to survive the folktale - which is life. I thought it would be very complicated to show this on film, but they made it by simply sticking to Orlando's look. The costume plays the most important role in this film and every nuance is expressed through costume - early baroque is not the same as rococo. And the costume designers know it very well. They will add or remove the layers to adjust the costume, sticking to historical facts, but also exaggerating some details. The passing of time is thus almost unnoticeable. Tilda Swinton is perfectly cast as Orlando, not only because of her androgynous looks, but because she is so intelligent and has great instincts - she understands what this story is about and how it should be told. This book/film may be misused to push the transgender agenda, but it's about nature. The human nature through history. Or, how sexes were looked or frowned upon in different historical moments. And every one of us is both male and female. We need both sides. "Orlando" is not a sex change flick, but a deep analysis of our deepest self and collective unconscious, as well. I love it that it's done through fashion.

My third entry in Potter's oeuvre, following YES (2004, 7/10) and THE MAN WHO CRIED (2000, 6/10), ORLANDO is a 7-chapter sumptuous period prose lilting swiftly from death, love, poetry, politics, society, sex to birth, in about 400 years from Queen Elizabeth I (Crisp) to present day (as in 1992). Adapted from Virginia Woolf's namesake novel, Orlando (Swinton) is a young peer who stops growing old after waning Queen's "Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old" benediction in the ceremonial DEATH chapter, sequentially, he has a taste of woman's treachery in LOVE from a Russian princess Sasha (Valandrey); in POETRY, his budding initiative is impudently disdained by a snobbish poet Nick Greene (Williams) who is seeking for a pension to get by and unscrupulously claims poetry is dead in England; he forays into POLITICS as an ambassador to Constantinople, forms a brotherly amicability with the Khan (Bluteau), after fighting in a fracas, one day he wakes up and inexplicably changes into a woman. Orlando goes back to SOCIETY, her new gender shoehorns her into a discriminatory reality reeks of scornful male chauvinism and she refuses the proposal from Archduke Harry (Wood). In SEX, at the dawn of industrial revolution, she meets the liberty-pursuing American Shelmerdine (Zane), they engage a spiritually sensual relationship against all odds. Finally in BIRTH, Orlando dashingly steers in a motorcycle with her young daughter in the sidecar in the modern day, rendering a sense of time-defying transcendence, both uncanny and enticing. Swinton is unambiguously captivating to play out her androgynous physique, extracts the otherworldliness out of the 400-year time-span, her attention-grabbing stare and utterance intentionally break the fourth wall and deliver the gist of each chapter, as if we were watching a seven-act play, only with more detailed and vivid tableaux. Potter knows perfectly about the gender-bending politics and Woolf's feminism stance, grants Crisp, the queer of queers, to play the Queen of Queens is a bold maneuver and potently satisfying. Among the rest supporting group, Heathcote Williams, who plays both a well-known bard and a modern-day publisher, brilliantly strikes as a theater dab-hand in his meager screen-time, and the second-billed Billy Zane is far less interesting and much duller by comparison. A flourishing and ethereal score from Potter and David Motion tellingly reflects Orlando's emotional trek, Jimmy Somerville's falsetto is beautifully presented both near the opening and in the angelic coda. Sandy Powell's trademark period costume and the entire art direction department also manage to satiate audience's eyes.Within a compact 90-minute, ORLANDO is running against its major default, a distractingly non- consistent narrative with erratic galloping through time and space, automatically pigeonholes the film in the arty ivory tower, if one is not familiar with the source novel (as myself), it will take more willpower to sustain the attention span and digest its poetic pulchritude. Some literature is innately unsuitable to be transposed into a film, be that as it may, Potter's artistry cannot be diminished as one of the most pioneering female director among her peer.

Absolutely superb movie...just saw it right before writing this...remember having seen the clip on YT,and it gave me the feeling I should enjoy it :I definitively did ! As say others comments, mesmerizing, mysterious, delicate...and very profound even though quiet hidden at the beginning...It reveals this aspect, like all the movie, like a woman in love,slowly, enigmatically, words after words, with great sensitivity...And Tilda Swinton, wow ! what an actress !Plus she's beautiful ! I didn't see any movie with her before,but for sure gonna see some more...Not at all a usual Jimmy Somerville fan, I just love his part too ;and last song leaves you full of hope in our humanity.Music, cinematography, set design and costuming are absolutely exquisite and stunning.But unfortunately guess this exceptional movie is not for everyone's taste..In one sentence, Sally Potter made a movie that you won't forget !Her film eventually expresses what Orson Welles wrote with so much accuracy :"a film is never really good unless the camera is an eyes in the head of a poet"