Orlando

Ah, this is Woolf done right! or better, wonderfully reenvisioned. Orlando traipses through four hundred years of British history, eternally young and trying on every sex and gender identity (though, being English, everyone pretends not to notice). It retains Woolf’s situations and themes without being a bit tied down to her prose; the book’s biographer-narrator cannot carry the film, it knows: Orlando him/herself must assume the first person. The same effects are translated in spirit with Orlando’s “fourth wall” reaction takes punctuating every incident. This is Woolf in a time that has caught up with her, through the lens of Butlerian “gender trouble” and further warped by postmodernism, a time prepared to believe it more readily when Orlando regards her female body for the first time and pronounces herself “the same person.” Tilda Swinton (and oh, she’s wonderful) is not perfectly androgynous, neither in reality nor to the extent she is made up here, and the he-Orlando segments are naturally infused with plenty of gender tension and irony. The film also takes Orlando past Woolf, to a modern London of skyscrapers and publishing deals; Orlando drives a motorbike and sidecar and thinks perhaps she has found a place and time for her daughter. This is not to suggest the film posits any kind of sociological idealism and ignorance; it remains daffy and fantastical to the end. And, one supposes, Orlando’s adventure through time and identity is hardly over… This is hilarious, immensely creative, and absolutely a great work in its own right to stand next to Woolf’s.