Orlando ****½ (1992, Tilda Swinton, Billy Zane, Quentin Crisp) – Classic Movie Review 5193

Writer-director Sally Potter’s breathtakingly beautiful 1992 film version of Virginia Woolf’s classic 1928 gender-bender novel finds exactly the right star in Tilda Swinton as a pretty young male Elizabethan courtier who turns into a woman as he/she travels through historical time down centuries of British history.

The delectable Swinton holds the film’s centre with her power and charisma. But surprisingly, since she is so ideally cast, she never quite convinces as an effeminate man and is on much more secure ground in the later sequences when she is playing a flirtatious lady chasing the dashing Shelmerdine (Billy Zane) in Victorian times.

Potter’s movie is a very entertaining, often funny film, with its arty, possibly heavyweight intentions mostly submerged in the playful surface and gorgeous visuals. Woolf’s sexual politics and messages do break through at odd moments, particularly in the delightful scenes of pioneering gay man Quentin Crisp, playing the elderly Queen Elizabeth I, in a complicated piece of acting as a Queen entranced by an actress playing a young effeminate man. She commands the young nobleman Orlando to stay forever young, and that’s what happens, though she doesn’t command him to change sex, which is also what happens.

Aleksei Rodionov’s cinematography is superb and the most extraordinary scenes of all were filmed in Russia.

Also in the iconic cast are John Wood, Lothaire Bluteau, Charlotte Valandrey (as Princess Sasha), Heathcote Williams, Dudley Sutton (as King James I), Thom Hoffman (as King William of Orange), John Grillo, Ned Sherrin, Peter Eyre, Roger Hammond (as Swift), Toby Jones, Toby Stephens (as Othello), Matthew Sim, Simon Russell Beale, and Jimmy Somerville (as Falsetto / Angel).

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5193

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