In the film version, Orlando (Tilda Swinton) is first seen pacing by himself at the foot of an oak. He reads. Although he is favored with the highest rank (a voiceover comments), he desires not privilege but company. Orlando puts pen to an exquisite sheet of paper; but he does not write. Where are the innumerable workers of Woolf's account, who make the great house seem like a busy town? Why is Orlando weighed down by solitude, rather than buoyed by it? What has become of his too-great fluency as a writer? (Woolf has him dash off several pages of a tragedy the way most of us would scribble a note to the mailman.) Never mind. It soon turns out that Potter has her own picture of the immortal, eternally youthful, sex-switching Orlando, who nevertheless comes close enough to the original to satisfy Woolf fans. And the surrounding fiction? Forgive my impertinence, but I think the film is every bit as good as the book.
Although most people call Orlando a novel, Woolf subtitled it A Biography. Nigel Nicolson, the son of its dedicates and subject, had an even better description: It's a love letter. But whatever you call the text, you can't get away from its having been written for and about Vita Sackville-West, with all the wit, imagination and coy insularity of a great novelist in the throes of infatuation. The results continue to charm most of Woolf's readers, most of the time, though some passages--such as the notorious "Rattigan Glumphoboo," Orlando's baby-talk message to her soulmate--have a way of making you feel like the third party on a hot date. Perhaps Orlando belongs in the category of favorite, rather than best, book by so-and-so.
But it makes for a hell of a good movie. Any story that requires four centuries' worth of costume changes ought to be able to hold its own on the screen--especially if the characters have money to burn. If the story also features a beautiful Russian princess (Charlotte Valandrey), a dashing Arab Khan (Lothaire Bluteau), an American adventurer (Billy Zane) and various parties, pageants and wars, then ninety-two minutes ought to fly, so long as the director doesn't get caught taking things too seriously.
Think of Josef von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress. There, as in Sally Potter's Orlando, history is a joke to which the audience is presumed to be wise. The production design, which is witty in itself, does not so much illustrate that history as substitute for it. Above all, the star in each film seems to be enjoying herself thoroughly, using her part as an excuse for playing against type. The best running gag of The Scarlet Empress is that Marlene Dietrich is supposedly innocent, meek and virginal. (At the very end of the film, upon officially becoming Catherine the Great, she does get to pose in two-shot with a horse.) In much the same spirit, Tilda Swinton manages to look as if she's in drag as both the male and female Orlando. As a young lord, she's like an Elizabethan painting that's come to life and is appropriately astonished at itself. It's not simply that Swinton is a woman in man's clothing; it's that a character from 1600 has magically been clothed in Swinton's flesh. But when Orlando gets to the eighteenth century and changes sex, Swinton again seems out of character, this time because she is a woman in woman's clothing. Those outfits don't suit her at all.
What does suit Swinton is Potter's direction. She creates a series of deliberately artificial tableaux vivants, in which the actress is in a sense the one freemoving element. When Queen Elizabeth comes to visit the home of Orlando's parents, the image that Potter puts on the screen seems like a stage direction translated directly into pictures: "Night. Torches." Orlando races to offer a bowl of rosewater to the Queen, finishing the gesture with a pretty flourish that reminds you of Potter's background as a choreographer. Then comes the dinner--another formal set piece, with the tables arrayed before a front-and-center camera. That the aged Queen is played by Quentin Crisp (who behaves as if no lesser role would be worthy of him) makes the scene all the more droll, of course, but also all the more of a showpiece for Swinton. Whereas Crisp is more or less a found object in the movie, Swinton is a subject who can't be contained on the screen. You might say she always plays a double role: both Orlando (young, candid, impressionable) and the older, wiser, offcamera intelligence that is busy creating the character.
I think this dual vision, which runs all the way through the film, is subtly different from Woolf's. If her Orlando is an imaginative reinvention of Vita Sackville West, then Potter's Orlando is an imaginative reinvention of Sally Potter. For that reason, the film seems less self-enclosed than the book--just as the confession is more public a genre than the love letter.
Those four centuries' worth of costumes in Orlando have been designed, reportedly at a ridiculously low cost, by Sandy Powell (who most recently wrapped leather around Jaye Davidson in The Crying Game). The production designers, Ben van Os and Jan Roelfs, have provided much the best entertainment in Peter Greenaway's last four films and also contributed significantly to Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo. The fine Russian-born cinematographer Alexei Rodionov gives the picture its look of enchantment, in torchlight and streaming sunshine alike.
All that's lacking among these collaborators, finally, is a sense that they had to make this movie. They lack the urgency of Virginia Woolf. The finale of her Orlando brings the protagonist closer and closer to the immediate present, with its chaos of sensation. The fantasy world runs smack into something that's unmanageable, dreadful, inescapable but also overwhelmingly exciting. As for Potter's Orlando, it ends with one of those fits of forced optimism that have become conventional among certain filmmakers who want to be politically advanced. After all that Elizabethan and Jacobean boozing, it's like a gulp of weak tea, and tepid, too.
When it comes to the here-and-now, Virginia Woolf's Orlando is the one that's got the kick. But don't let that stop you from seeing Potter's version. What's been lost in urgency, in Moor's heads and in the contemplation of literary history (which is Woolf's other great infatuation in Orlando) has been gained in sheer spectacle. We should not be too quick to dismiss spectacle. Although sometimes condemned as inherently domineering in its effect, here it's merely a good-natured form of playing dress-up, for the entertainment of Sally Potter and her cast and anybody else who'd like to attend. The good news is, we're all invited.