After 31 years, Sally Potter’s Orlando is re-released, a dreamy, swoony reverie of shapeshifting sexual id; “gender” isn’t the phrase used. It’s the movie that confirmed Tilda Swinton within the arthouse-icon standing that Derek Jarman had given her (Hollywood status was to come back eight years later, in Danny Boyle’s The Seashore). The film concludes with a rapturous closeup on Swinton’s face: chic, seraphic, enigmatic, whereas Jimmy Somerville serenades her from heaven, a cheeky falsetto cherub fluttering within the sky.
Potter tailored the 1928 novel by Virginia Woolf, a fantasy journey impressed by her love affair with Vita Sackville-West; it was additionally impressed by Woolf’s barely snobbish reverence for Sackville-West’s centuries-spanning aristocratic family tree, and by their deliciously thrilling patrician-bohemian disregard for bourgeois hetero-normality. With this movie, Potter single-handedly upgraded this guide from mere jeu d’ésprit, giving it literary canonical standing and making it a key textual content for gender research. She additionally established a practice of casting a feminine actor quite than a male within the lead in future diversifications – though Emma Corrin, starring in the recent London West Finish stage revival, is non-binary.
Orlando is a pulchritudinous younger courtier whose unusual future is to stay in a state of everlasting youth and androgynous magnificence from the sixteenth to the twentieth century (and presumably past). As a favorite of Elizabeth I (a wittily forged Quentin Crisp), Orlando acquires a landed property and earnings and assumes a prestigious social function below James I (Dudley Sutton); he falls in love with a Russian noblewoman, Princess Sasha (Charlotte Valandrey). However, jilted by her and offended by the mediocre literary hack Nick Greene (Heathcote Williams) who mocks his verses, Orlando takes a diplomatic function as ambassador to the Ottoman empire, the place he’s to metamorphose into a lady. She comes house to search out that she is disinherited, however has a Victorian-era romance with American adventurer Shelmerdine, performed by a considerably smirking Billy Zane. Orlando carries on into the twentieth century (proven in a single frankly quite valuable scene striding throughout a primary world warfare battlefield), and at last within the Nineties delivering her autobiography to a shallow, commercially obsessed writer (performed once more by Williams).
That is an exotically theatrical and mannered movie, with one thing of the court docket masque in every scene; it’s absolutely impressed, for good or sick, by Peter Greenaway, and there’s additionally a quite Michael Nyman-esque rating. It might look dated sometimes, however Swinton’s fourth-wall breaks to digital camera have one thing of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag about them. We additionally get a richly gifted forged, with the younger Simon Russell Beale, Toby Jones and Toby Stephens alongside for the trip in minor roles.
In a means, this can be a movie by aesthetes, for aesthetes, and a movie which muses and flirts with the concepts of poetry and sensuality – though poetry itself, and Orlando’s supposed vocation as a poet, just isn’t overwhelmingly necessary. (She really finally ends up writing prose.) And Orlando’s conversion from male to feminine apparently doesn’t particularly change her persona. I’ve by no means been certain precisely how profound this film is, and it generally teeters on the sting of complacency, however it has a trance-inducing strangeness and Swinton is insouciantly magnetic always.
