Or, regrettably, in Sally Potter's film.

Potter, a London-based experimental filmmaker, has worked on documentaries and in television; her first feature film was The Gold Diggers (1981), starring Julie Christie. She had wanted to make a film based on Woolf's Orlando since reading the book as an adolescent (Potter is now only in her early forties), and spent years raising money-- about $5 million-- for her own Orlando. And it is her own; she wrote and directed the film, released in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Classics. Hers is the ambitious vision-- and hers the failure.

Well, failure is relative. The film has received raves from European critics; the Sundance Film Festival, the New York Times, and Newsweek have waxed hyperbolic about its dazzling cinematography, lush production, epic sweep, daring adaptation. The cinematography (by Alexei Rodionov, making his film debut outside Russia) is at times dazzling; it actually does justice to the novel's great ice-skating scene on the frozen Thames. The production is lush; designers Ben van Os and Jan Roelfs, known for their work with director Peter Greenaway, offer settings redolent of magnificence, and Sandy Powell (whose credits include the dubious honor of having costumed Mick Jagger) has provided the requisite sensual velvets and rustling satins. The film's sweep is more limited than the novel's effect on a reader's imagination, but to call it epic isn't too much of an exaggeration; shot on locations in England, St. Petersburg, and Uzbekistan, the story is faithful to Woolf at least insofar as it spans centuries and sites. Certainly Potter deserves kudos for the audacity of her attempt and for its visual impact. But one wonders if film critics ever read books. Because the problem lies with Potter's shortcomings as writer and choices as director.

Did we really need an Orlando bereft of Woolf's wit, sensibility, subtlety, and politics? Can one-line voice-overs or full-face stares into the lens by Orlando-- played by a comatose Tilda Swinton-- substitute for the insightful riches of internal monologue? The only moments of wit in the film are when Potter (too rarely) quotes the source-- as when Orlando, turned female, learns that she cannot inherit her own property: "The chief charges against her where (1) she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which amounts to much the same thing."

As for Potter's "improvements" on the plot, they are nothing short of disasterous. Woolf's wry perceptions are either oversimplified into banality or erased outright. Instead of being a talentless, would-be poet who longs for literary fame and spends 400 years trying to finish a single "great poem," Potter1s Orlando is a serious writer. (So much for irony.) Instead of intransigently remaining a snobbish albeit likeable aristocrat from Elizabethan times to 1928, this Orlando forsakes her inheritance for single motherhood and a motorcycle in the 1990s. (So much for class commentary.) Instead of the finely wrought, internal differences explored in Orlando's change from male to female-- including an implicit female-to-female eroticism-- the film's message is that there really is no meaningful difference. The result is a sort of period-piece parody of The Crying Game. What feminism there is in the film is of the pouty, male-imitative, "I can do that, too!" variety. (Virginia would wince.) Potter was quoted in the New York Times as insisting that her film should not be construed as a feminist statement, that women have difficult lives but so do men. Alas, this should have served as warning.

Then there are the gratuitous violations that serve no purpose whatsoever except, perhaps, a trendy "gender fuck" (as it's so charmingly named) message. Why else have Quentin Crisp sashay around as Queen Elizabeth I, transvestite-style? Or cast a long-maned, rock-star type U.S. actor as Shelmerdine, Orlando's sometimes husband? Or change Orlando's son to a daughter (who sports a videocam, yet)? And where in hell does that tacky, plaster-of-Paris angel dangling in the sky at the end come from? Campy, yes. Bloomsbury, no.

Because Woolf wrote Orlando for Vita Sackville-West, Vita's son, Nigel Nicolson (himself responsible for the oversympathetic-to-daddy version of his parents' life in Portrait of a Marriage), called it "the longest and most charming love letter in literature." Well, yes-- but a letter written as an affectionate revenge, carved with a sharp-edged pen by a lover who had an even sharper eye for the faults (superficiality, snobbery, dilettantism, fickleness, and more) of her charismatic, flirtatious beloved. These ironies wafted right over Vita's flattered head; she adored the book. Potter's film might have even been to her liking (and doubtless Nigel's). For Virginia, however, this film might have presented yet another reason to fill her pockets with stones and go swimming.

Save your box-office money and your time; no wild-goose chase necessary. Buy the book, if you haven't got a well-thumbed edition already, and read or reread Woolf's Orlando. It's the pearl, the steel-blue feather, the real thing.