"Writer-director Sally Potter wanted to film Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando for two reasons. She liked the way it tackled what it is to be a woman or a man. Orlando, born into the English aristocracy, not only drifts from 1600 to the late 1900s without aging a day, but begins as a callow, inarticulate man and, around 1750, for no particular reason, wakes up as a woman. “Same person,” he (now she) says directly to the camera. “No difference at all. Just a different sex.”The film glides through politics, social niceties and England’s colonialist assumptions with ironic detachment. At a literary salon, Jonathan Swift airily intones that “women have no desires, only affectations.” Bailiffs declare Orlando to be legally dead and officially a woman, “which amounts to the same thing” when it comes to owning property."But the best argument for dropping everything and watching Orlando (1992), out next Tuesday as a “special edition” DVD, is the second reason Potter gave for choosing the material: the images. The film is beautiful. A torchlight parade dimly illuminates the canal as Queen Elizabeth I’s barge arrives. A coffin is born by black-clad figures through a snowy forest. Orlando washes her face from a bowl in what could pass as a painting by Vermeer. The costumes are so fine and the settings so arresting that it’s easy to miss incidental details, such as topiary in the shape of giant teacups.
I had no idea this had been adapted, and with Tilda Swinton in the titular role, no less. I saw her recently in I Am Love--the less said, the better--and she was a wonder. I had heard tales of her unearthliness; I had no idea they were indeed true. Not only will this be Netflixed, it might even make it to the top of the queue.
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