Orlando
by Sally Potter
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Billy Zane, Elaine Banham, John Bott, Quentin Crisp, Tilda SwintonDirector: Sally Potter
Writer: Sally Potter
Producer: Christopher Sheppard
Producer: Laurie Borg
Producer: Lynn Hanke
Producer: Martine Kelly
Producer: Richard Salmon
Writer: Virginia Woolf
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; Spanish (Original Language), Unknown
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.85:1
Running Time: 94 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1999-08-03
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Movie Reviews of Orlando
Movie Review: ORLANDO: A Film that Defies Categorization
Summary: 5 Stars
ORLANDO is not one of Virginia Woolf's better known novels, and with good reason. In its gender-bending themes, one is never quite sure what to make of it. Director Sally Potter took this amorphous quality and transferred it to the screen by re-writing both script and plot until the film and the book have long since parted company. What remains is a cinematic masterpiece that either dares the viewer to comprehend it or defies him. In the real world, one might think that anyone who was publically immortal might have world reknown or anyone who changed genders in an age bereft of transgender surgery might be equally famed. And certainly one who did both would be a superstar in any age. But in Potter's view of England that spans four centuries from 1600 to 2000 the general public seems to take such astonishing news in stride, and that may be the point. We are not supposed to take ORLANDO under any prism of realism nor are we meant to endure a willing suspension of belief. Rather, Potter intends us to view the panorama of English history in much the same dream like manner that we excercise as we accompany Alice down the rabbit hole.
Tilda Swinton as the androgynous Orlando appears as a feminine-looking male in the court of Queen Elizabeth, herself played by the cross dressing Quentin Crisp. It calls for some blunting of the imagination for the viewer to accept Orlando as a male since he truly looks like a female in male drag. One day, the Queen commands Orlando, as her boy toy favorite, never to age. And magically his biological clock ceases ticking. No explanation other than her royal prerogative is given and none is needed. Orlando has normal sexual desires for a man. He falls heavily for the lovely daughter of a Russian ambassador who jilts him, thereby repeating Orlando's similar rejection of an English woman chosen to be his betrothed. The decades and centuries pass and no one seems to notice the miracle in their midst. There are many splendid scenes of architecture that captivate the eye, but these are distractions from the real business at hand--to present a multi-gender view of English history. After two centuries, Orlando transforms into a woman, again magically, again illogically. From this vantage she can expatiate on a view of a male-dominant society symbolized by Pope, Addison, and Swift, all of whom come across as male chauvinistic piggies of the worst sort. More decades pass, but the only changes seem to be in technology and architecture. Other characters enter and exit with little impact on Orlando. Billy Zane is the exception as he comes THIS close to convincing her to accompany him on his travels to America.
While all this time spanning action occurs, Swinton as Orlando has the difficult task of remaining gender neutral in her capacity as the film's center. Her Orlando shows very little emotion. Instead she reveals her inner thoughts in direct asides to the camera, thus intensifying in the viewer that what is being seen is a fiction. We never know what drives Orlando to wish to live so long. She wants a child and she has one but that adds no dimension to her part. ORLANDO ultimately emerges as a film that entertains even as it makes no pretense as to how or why.
Summary of Orlando
Breathtaking and practically nondiscursive, Sally Potter's audacious Orlando overcomes some dodgy performances and a narrative structure that could most generously be described as "loose" to emerge as a haunting, discussion-provoking trans-historical and transsexual drama. Commanded never to age by Queen Elizabeth (played with surprisingly little camp by legendary cross-dresser Quentin Crisp), the title character becomes immortal; we then follow Orlando through 400 years of dreamlike British history. Midway through the film, Orlando changes genders--to Potter's immense credit, the transformation is handled with little fanfare and no explanation. Tilda Swinton, in the lead role, is far more convincing as a woman than as a man, and even during the film's latter half, her impassivity and lack of expression can be annoying. Potter encourages Swinton to play to the camera, and the resulting asides and glances askance can be amusing, but often seem purposeless, or even arch. Nevertheless, the willful idiosyncrasy and understatement of the film never quite capsize the project, and once you give yourself over to the filmmaker's logic, the panoramic sweep of the cinematography (remarkable sets include an aristocratic skating party on the frozen Thames during the Great London Frost of 1603, a stunning tent-caravan in Central Asia, and countless fastidious boudoirs and interiors) will surely keep you enraptured. Orlando is no Merchant-Ivory production, no prissy, forgettable period piece; this film has teeth, and it may bite ferociously when you least expect it to. Based on, but scarcely resembling, the Virginia Woolf modernist classic of the same name. --Miles BethanySimilar DVD Movies
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