A hundred years later, in 1700, having been crushed in love by the ravishing daughter (Charlotte Valandrey) of a Russian ambassador and failed miserably in the art of poetry, Orlando finds himself-- not a day older-- enmeshed in bloody political intrigue in the deserts of Central Asia. There, he wakes one day, fairy-tale style, to discover that His Lordship has become Her Ladyship. Examining her undeniably female body in a mirror, she turns to the camera and dryly announces: "Same person, no difference at all. Just a different sex."

But in the salons of 1750s England, Orlando discovers the inconveniences of her new gender: unless she marries and has a male heir, she will lose all legal rights to her property. Fleeing a suitor into a formal garden maze, she emerges into the mid-19th century and into the arms of a Byronic American adventurer (Billy Zane), who reveals to her the sensual pleasures of womanhood. In the final section, she bears his child in the 20th century and realizes, though she is solitary and disinherited, her true independent self. A mischievous and marvelous tapestry, Orlando is a movie of surfaces more than depth-- but what breathtaking surfaces. And at the center of each panel, delicate and grave as a pearl, is the magnificent Swinton, a paradigm of two sexes and a beacon leading to androgynous common ground.