I Would Like to See It: Orlando

Any movie with the balls to cast Quentin Crisp (incidentally a trans woman who never transitioned) as Elizabeth I is a movie I can’t help but root for, and Sally Potter’s Orlando uses it just as its jumping-off point. By the fifteen-minute mark we’ve seen royals titter at the spectacle of a young person encased in ice beneath the surface of the Thames, the Jacobean court practicing tandem ice skating, and the queen borne over the water by barge while a man, who will later reappear in grainy camcorder footage as an angel, extols her virtues in haunting song. Orlando takes the painterly stream of consciousness smear in which Woolf’s work lives and flicks it artfully at the screen, the end result something deeply connected to her writing in a way no other adaptation has succeeded in capturing.

Tilda Swinton in the title role is assuredly a key element of this success, her famously androgynous — to use the common nymphlike implication of the word — frame and features fitted with natural ease to Woolf’s story of a young English noble unstuck from time. Sandy Powell and Dien van Straalen’s costumes are astonishing, a feast of textures and drapery as unusual and beautiful as the score by David Motion and Potter herself. From the film’s first moments Potter cultivates a dreamlike atmosphere, highly staged shots of nature like a series of oil paintings viewed by lamplight, faces cast in washes of gold and bronze. Not a single scene feels less than fully realized, and Potter’s quietly matter-of-fact script stays just shy of moralizing, light enough that its points land precisely where they’re meant to but sufficiently blunt that you can feel the weight behind them.

The transformation of the title character’s sex and gender is key to its thesis, repositioning gender identity as a reaction to the world. It’s a thoughtful idea, and Orlando moves past it with merciful swiftness rather than linger and become bogged down in definitions. Where it dwells most deeply is on society’s reaction to the unusual, its need to constantly engulf and regiment any deviation. There’s a wonderful little scene in which an archduke proposes with great ardour and adoration to Orlando only to angrily declare, with direct reference to her sexual ambiguity, “Who else would have you?” when she refuses him. We want what confuses and entices us only so long as it can be embalmed, labeled, and set on a shelf. Orlando has no interest in such banalities; it has no time for answers, rules, or exposition. It’s a spell, and one we’re lucky Potter chose to cast.