Orlando
Sally Potter, UK, 1992, 92 mins
Review by Gerald Houghton (1993)

For a long time a moth flitting about the edges of the avant garde, Sally Potter's first major feature arrives on screen by appropriating the mainstays of the British art-house movie; from the cerebral Peter Greenaway she takes Ben van Os and Jan Roelfs - the Dutch design team responsible for many of that director's most handsome productions - and a score, composed by herself and David Motion, that owes more than a little to the elegiac/processional constructions of the great Michael Nyman. And from the more camp, more humane Derek Jarman she purloins both a costume designer - Sandy Powell - and a star, Tilda Swinton.

Adapted freely from Virginia Woolf's homage to Vita Sackville-West, Swinton is Orlando, in the receipt of a house from Elizabeth I on the sole proviso that he not grow old, that he does not wither. To this end the young man simply stops growing, content instead to pass through the ages from 1600 to the present day making one brief stop along the way to change his sex and discover that, legally dead, she is no longer entitled to the ancestral home, and by being a woman it amounts to more or less the same thing anyway.

A film of such scope obviously requires a centre capable of cementing the whole, and Potter is fortunate to have captured Jarman's regular muse for the job. With an obvious androgyny anyway, no elaborate attempt is made on the film's part to pretend a maleness for the initial Orlando, nor a particular femaleness for the later incarnation, instead we are simply told the facts of the situation; the grand switch merely occurs overnight, "Same person, different sex." Swinton's prime contribution is, therefore, to bring to the role a humanity and good humour that spans the divide to no ill-effect, and a rather charming scatty inquisitiveness.

This parade through history is seamlessly realised chiefly through its relative simplicity, be it the celebration James I throws on the frozen Thames for Muscovite nobles, Elizabeth's visit to the young Orlando's home, or her final sojourn at her ancestral home as a tourist. And Potter gets to toss in to the mix a whole slew of notable cameos, from a duel role for Jarman's one-time Prospero, Heathcote Williams, professional wit Ned Sherrin and US heart-throb Billy Zane as a Victorian gentleman-adventurer, to a deliciously outrageous Quentin Crisp as the Virgin Queen (the true Queen of England, as Potter calls him), leaving the audience with the farcical conceit of a man playing a woman, playing opposite a woman as a man.

The real merit of the picture though is that writer/director Potter never allows message and meaning to obscure the essential sense of fun that runs throughout. Her feminism seeps through it all in the background but is never pressed, and it makes its points about the sexual divide with grace and an infectious good humour, consistently undercutting its own pretensions by having Swinton turn to the camera and address her audience directly. It never makes the mistake of aiming too high and thus remains substantial, hitting its targets square on, whilst still retaining something of the air of the pantomime about it all. Idiosyncratic, admirable, and Tilda Swinton is magnificent.