Maclean's

Maclean's - July 19, 1993

by Brian D. Johnson

Even in Hollywood, where dinosaurs can rise from the dead, the premise might seem a little wild: a member of the English nobility who is mysteriously immune to the ravages of time spends four centuries looking for happiness, first as a man, then as a woman. But Orlando is not from Hollywood. It is based on the 1928 novel by Virginia Woolf, a gender-bending fantasy that she wrote as a mock biography of her friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. With $5 million and a fine cast, British director Sally Potter has transformed Woolf's literary conceit into a cinematic conceit of undeniable merit. Orlando is an exquisite spectacle, a cross-dressed costume drama sequined with feminist wit. But in the end, it seems insubstantial, a series of conjuring tricks that dazzle without quite suspending disbelief.

The episodic narrative begins in the 1500s, with Queen Elizabeth (Quentin Crisp) granting Orlando (Tilda Swinton) property and favors while decreeing that his youth must never fade. The film's early scenes, which portray the Elizabethan nobility skating on the frozen Thames during the Great Frost, are the most extraordinary. Sweeping around the ice, Orlando falls hopelessly in love with a Russian princess (Charlotte Valandrey), who eventually leaves him for a bolder man. The delicate Orlando takes solace in poetry, then accepts a diplomatic posting in the Middle East, where he meets an unlikely looking sultan--played by Quebec actor Lothaire Bluteau.

The grim prospect of having to fight in a war jolts Orlando into a sudden and convenient sex change. As a woman, she returns to 18th-century England, where she has a romantic interlude with a visiting American pioneer (Billy Zane). The narrative then accelerates, resolving Orlando's quest for completion in present-day London--just as Woolf ended the novel in her present-day London of the 1920s.

Swinton acts with admirable poise, her eyes seeming to gain translucence with each phase in the story. But Orlando becomes more preposterous on-screen than on the page. At best it is an amusing escapade full of arresting images. At worst it is self-satisfied and coyly cerebral--Virginia Woolf's excellent adventure.

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