Orlando

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  May 23, 2009

  ceWEBrity

  A true forgotten classic. Watching Orlando is heartbreaking because you know they're never going to make another film as bizarre or beautiful as this ever again. Modern Hollywood just wouldn't allow something involving an androgynous immortal, inexplicable gender changes, the bre...( read more)aking of the fourth wall, and a bizarrely evangelical ending to be distributed, let alone created for 5 million dollars.
  
  This is art. It doesn't always make sense, but trying to parse it and giving it personal meaning makes the experience completely worthwhile. Kudos to Sally Potter for creating such an uncompromising adaptation of a Virginia Woolf novel. Kudos to Tilda Swinton, who I fall more in love with every day and who has one of the most exciting and diverse filmographies of any living performer today. Kudos to all involved with this striking, unique, powerful innovation.

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• 
  
  April 17, 2009

  ebs90

  This is Sally Potter's beautiful, otherworldly adaptation of Virginia Woolf's story. Orlando reaches a tone, a temperature, a state of dream-like ambiguity that many other art films often thrive to possess. It's immediately enchanting on the surface: fantastic set design, photogr...( read more)aphy, make-up, costumes and music, but there's a fascinating substance underneath it all.
  
  Orlando is born into a noble English family in the 17th Century. Ever since he's a youth he is enamored with poetry and love, and little else. His mother, mortified by her old age and by death, leaves him her palace as inheritance, with the condition that he remain young forever. Orlando's life extends itself through centuries, during which time he also gets disillusioned with his virility after a romantic frustration and decides to try his luck at love from a woman's perspective.
  
  The spirit of this film is Tilda Swinton's epic performance. This is a role cut out for her. She makes perfect use of her androgynous looks and her characteristic refinement to play Orlando. She's not particularly my favorite actress, but here she's wonderful, as is all the supporting cast. Billy Zane has a brief but relevant appearance and delivers a lovely performance.
  
  So... Orlando attracted me for the intriguing storyline, how Sally Potter would manage to bring it to life, and for Swinton's demanding role. I think it shouldn't be missed precisely for its success in all those areas. It's quite different from many other films, especially because of its very original source material.

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  February 19, 2008

  mistershinobi

  Tilda's performance... the final song by Jimmy Somerville... and Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth... Sally Potter has a total masterpiece in her hands, an underrated masterpiece.

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  September 3, 2007

  hoganshero

  This epic film had me glued to the TV. This is a gender bending ride through history!

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  June 27, 2007

  lavenderfawn

  I had to watch this movie twice to really "get it". Now I do....and I hope you do too. It's visually stunning and complicated...

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  November 4, 2009

  mrchewbacca

  Una deliciosa historia

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  October 5, 2009

  Phonex

  Notes on the Adaptation of the Book Orlando by Sally Potter
  
  My task with the adaptation of Virginia Woolf?s book for the screen was to find a way of remaining true to the spirit of the book and to Virginia Woolf?s intentions, whilst being ruthless with changing the book in any...( read more) way necessary to make it work cinematically.
  
  It would have been a disservice to Virginia Woolf to remain slavish to the letter of the book, for just as she was always a writer who engaged with writing and the form of the novel, similarly the film needed to engage with the energy of cinema. And although the book was already a distillation of 400 years of English history (albeit an imagined view of that history, told with a liberal amount of poetic license), the film needed to distill even further.
  
  The most immediate changes were structural. The storyline was simplified?any events which did not significantly further Orlando?s story were dropped.
  
  The narrative also needed to be driven. Whereas the novel could withstand abstraction and arbitrariness (such as Orlando?s change of sex) cinema is more pragmatic. There had to be reasons?however flimsy?to propel us along a journey based itself on a kind of suspension of disbelief.
  
  Thus Queen Elizabeth bestows Orlando?s long life upon him ("Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old . . .") whereas in the book it remains unexplained. And Orlando?s change of sex in the film is the result of his having reached a crisis point?a crisis of masculine identity. On the battlefield he looks death and destruction in the face and faces the challenge of kill or be killed. It is Orlando?s unwillingness to conform to what is expected of him as a man that leads?within the logic of the film?to his change of sex. Later, of course, as a woman, Orlando finds that she cannot conform to what is expected of her as a female either, and makes a series of choices which leave her, unlike in the book, without marriage or property?and with a daughter, not a son.
  
  These latter changes seemed to me entirely consistent with Virginia Woolf?s views in her other works on the condition of women?s lives (especially A Room of One?s Own) and crisply logical within the framework set up in the earlier part of the story.
  
  Orlando is at its heart a story of loss?the loss of time as it passes?a meditation on the impermanence of love, power, and politics. I simply carried that logic through to include Orlando?s loss of property and status in the 20th century. Whilst the loss of property in the story is a symptom of the second class status of women, there is also an aspect which is worthy of celebration: the loss of privilege and status based on an outdated English class system.
  
  Orlando was of course originally written as a spoof biography of Vita Sackville-West. Where the book holds most tightly to apparent biographical facts it occasionally loses its power as a story (such as Orlando?s "keeping" the house at the end of the book?which was a way for Virginia Woolf to restore the lost Knole to Vita Sackville-West).
  
  I tried to restore Orlando on film to a view more consistently detached and bitingly ironic in its view of the English class system and the colonial attitudes arising from it.
  
  At the same time I needed to ensure that Orlando was a loveable character. The clue was to highlight Orlando?s essential innocence. He happens to have been born into a class, a place and time, and is shaped by it?but as the essential human being remains; the patterns of behaviour and attitude are transformed.
  
  Other obvious changes from the book include dialogue (and poems) which have been invented from sometimes slender clues on the page?and Orlando?s words and looks to the camera which were intended as an equivalent both of Virginia Woolf?s direct addresses to her readers and to try to convert Virginia Woolf?s literary wit into cinematic humor at which people could laugh out loud.
  
  Finally, the ending of the film needed to be brought into the present in order to remain true to Virginia Woolf?s use of real-time at the end of the novel (where the story finishes just as she puts down her pen to finish the book). Coming up to the present day meant acknowledging some key events of the 20th century--the two world wars, the electronic revolution?the contraction of space through time reinvented by speed. But the film ends somewhere between heaven and earth in a place of ecstatic communion with the present moment.

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  July 6, 2009

  RockmaryMackerel

  Very unrealistic fiction movie, well acted, great dialogs, interesting content.

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  July 1, 2009

  jscottcorley

  Dude looks like a lady.

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  January 31, 2009

  jimbotender

  I yearn for one thing only: to revive Virginia Woolf for 2 hours and let her enjoy her creation on-screen.

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• 
  June 2, 2006

  myheartbleedsme

  Less what dismisses enjoyable and desirable truth

• Billy Zane
• Charlotte Valandrey
• Elaine Banham
• Heathcote Williams
• Jimmy Somerville
• John Bott
• John Wood
• Lothaire Bluteau
• Quentin Crisp

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