My third entry in Potter's oeuvre, following YES (2004, 7/10) and THE MAN WHO CRIED (2000, 6/10), ORLANDO is a 7-chapter sumptuous period prose lilting swiftly from death, love, poetry, politics, society, sex to birth, in about 400 years from Queen Elizabeth I (Crisp) to present day (as in 1992).
Adapted from Virginia Woolf's namesake novel, Orlando (Swinton) is a young peer who stops growing old after waning Queen's "Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old" benediction in the ceremonial DEATH chapter, sequentially, he has a taste of woman's treachery in LOVE from a Russian princess Sasha (Valandrey); in POETRY, his budding initiative is impudently disdained by a snobbish poet Nick Greene (Williams) who is seeking for a pension to get by and unscrupulously claims poetry is dead in England; he forays into POLITICS as an ambassador to Constantinople, forms a brotherly amicability with the Khan (Bluteau), after fighting in a fracas, one day he wakes up and inexplicably changes into a woman. Orlando goes back to SOCIETY, her new gender shoehorns her into a discriminatory reality reeks of scornful male chauvinism and she refuses the proposal from Archduke Harry (Wood). In SEX, at the dawn of industrial revolution, she meets the liberty-pursuing American Shelmerdine (Zane), they engage a spiritually sensual relationship against all odds. Finally in BIRTH, Orlando dashingly steers in a motorcycle with her young daughter in the sidecar in the modern day, rendering a sense of time-defying transcendence, both uncanny and enticing.
Swinton is unambiguously captivating to play out her androgynous physique, extracts the otherworldliness out of the 400-year time-span, her attention-grabbing stare and utterance intentionally break the fourth wall and deliver the gist of each chapter, as if we were watching a seven-act play, only with more detailed and vivid tableaux. Potter knows perfectly about the gender-bending politics and Woolf's feminism stance, grants Crisp, the queer of queers, to play the Queen of Queens is a bold maneuver and potently satisfying. Among the rest supporting group, Heathcote Williams, who plays both a well-known bard and a modern-day publisher, brilliantly strikes as a theater dab-hand in his meager screen-time, and the second-billed Billy Zane is far less interesting and much duller by comparison.
A flourishing and ethereal score from Potter and David Motion tellingly reflects Orlando's emotional trek, Jimmy Somerville's falsetto is beautifully presented both near the opening and in the angelic coda. Sandy Powell's trademark period costume and the entire art direction department also manage to satiate audience's eyes.
Within a compact 90-minute, ORLANDO is running against its major default, a distractingly non- consistent narrative with erratic galloping through time and space, automatically pigeonholes the film in the arty ivory tower, if one is not familiar with the source novel (as myself), it will take more willpower to sustain the attention span and digest its poetic pulchritude. Some literature is innately unsuitable to be transposed into a film, be that as it may, Potter's artistry cannot be diminished as one of the most pioneering female director among her peer.
Adapted from Virginia Woolf's namesake novel, Orlando (Swinton) is a young peer who stops growing old after waning Queen's "Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old" benediction in the ceremonial DEATH chapter, sequentially, he has a taste of woman's treachery in LOVE from a Russian princess Sasha (Valandrey); in POETRY, his budding initiative is impudently disdained by a snobbish poet Nick Greene (Williams) who is seeking for a pension to get by and unscrupulously claims poetry is dead in England; he forays into POLITICS as an ambassador to Constantinople, forms a brotherly amicability with the Khan (Bluteau), after fighting in a fracas, one day he wakes up and inexplicably changes into a woman. Orlando goes back to SOCIETY, her new gender shoehorns her into a discriminatory reality reeks of scornful male chauvinism and she refuses the proposal from Archduke Harry (Wood). In SEX, at the dawn of industrial revolution, she meets the liberty-pursuing American Shelmerdine (Zane), they engage a spiritually sensual relationship against all odds. Finally in BIRTH, Orlando dashingly steers in a motorcycle with her young daughter in the sidecar in the modern day, rendering a sense of time-defying transcendence, both uncanny and enticing.
Swinton is unambiguously captivating to play out her androgynous physique, extracts the otherworldliness out of the 400-year time-span, her attention-grabbing stare and utterance intentionally break the fourth wall and deliver the gist of each chapter, as if we were watching a seven-act play, only with more detailed and vivid tableaux. Potter knows perfectly about the gender-bending politics and Woolf's feminism stance, grants Crisp, the queer of queers, to play the Queen of Queens is a bold maneuver and potently satisfying. Among the rest supporting group, Heathcote Williams, who plays both a well-known bard and a modern-day publisher, brilliantly strikes as a theater dab-hand in his meager screen-time, and the second-billed Billy Zane is far less interesting and much duller by comparison.
A flourishing and ethereal score from Potter and David Motion tellingly reflects Orlando's emotional trek, Jimmy Somerville's falsetto is beautifully presented both near the opening and in the angelic coda. Sandy Powell's trademark period costume and the entire art direction department also manage to satiate audience's eyes.
Within a compact 90-minute, ORLANDO is running against its major default, a distractingly non- consistent narrative with erratic galloping through time and space, automatically pigeonholes the film in the arty ivory tower, if one is not familiar with the source novel (as myself), it will take more willpower to sustain the attention span and digest its poetic pulchritude. Some literature is innately unsuitable to be transposed into a film, be that as it may, Potter's artistry cannot be diminished as one of the most pioneering female director among her peer.