Sally Potter, a young Englishwoman of evident brains and talent, has written and directed a film of Orlando (Sony Classics). The film itself makes clear that she understood most of the difficulties involved in adapting Virginia Woolf's book. But the film also makes clear that she didn't quite grasp the inevitable. Woolf's work is in the form that it's in because that's what it is.
One basic problem, as Potter did see, is not so much with the story--which presents problems enough--but with the prose: how to transmute it into film. For instance, after Orlando calls aloud her lover's name: "The beautiful, glittering name fell out of the sky like a steel blue feather." "Film that, Potter," she doubtlessly said to herself about that and about a hundred other instances in the book. She took steps. She engaged Alexei Ridionov, the very best of the Russian cinematographers whose work I've seen, and with him she contrived sequences that in themselves are gorgeous, evocative, austere, lush. Halations often crown scenes like aureoles.
The trouble is that all these sequences don't meld into the Woolf tissue, and without that tissue the book is only a fantastic tale. We can imagine that after Potter showed one or another sequence to people--possibly to backers--they said, "That's it. You've got it. Now for the whole thing." But the whole thing is precisely what isn't here. Probably couldn't be. Twenty-five years ago Mary Ellen Bute made a film modestly called Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and, within scale, she succeeded better in her venture than Potter does here.
I don't mean to rank Woolf with Joyce. For this reader, Orlando is a lesser work than some claim. In the course of the book the disparaging poet Nicholas Greene says of Sir Thomas Browne that "he was for writing poetry in prose and people soon got tired of such conceits as that." It was brave of Woolf to include that line because it states her own book's risk-taking--the reader's feeling after a while that a slog through a barnyard might be a welcome respite from the empyrean. Still, there is the empyrean in the book, and we're constantly aware of Potter's gifted but unavailing attempts to reach it.
There's another trouble, too, inherent in the move to film. Woolf's fantasy follows her protagonist from the Elizabethan age to the present (which here is sensibly moved to our present from Woolf's 1928), with era stops along the way and with a gender change from male to female. For all these delicate impossibilities, Woolf enlists our collaboration simply by assuming that readers, taken by the manner of the telling, will work the necessary magic themselves. It's a cunning call to partnership with her, which flatters us and succeeds.
But film doesn't need that collaboration. Film is the very home of ascendancy over the literal, the earthbound. Changes of place and century and sex, in an instant, offer no problem whatsoever and need no kind of collaboration from the audience. Many decades of filmic miracles have left us, in a sense, imaginatively slothful because we needn't lift a figurative finger. Fantasy on film demands less. It's "normal." On the screen, Orlando almost gets jostled into the Time Bandits genre.
Some lesser quibbles. Why is Othello misquoted? Why is Orlando's eventual son changed to a daughter? This upsets the gender cycle that Woolf presumably had in mind. Why insert such banal locutions as "Goodbye. Good luck"?
On the other hand, some of Potter's touches are fine. Queen Elizabeth's arrival at Orlando's stately home is a really royal progress. A tea party that the eighteenth-century Orlando attends, with Swift and Addison and Pope, is good pastiche fun. The gauzy-mysterious palace of a Middle Eastern potentate has pleasant Arabian Nights languor.
Some of the performances are striking. Quentin Crisp, in a nod to the story's androgyny, plays Elizabeth and is grandly sour as the old queen. It's she who bids Orlando, her young favorite, never to age. (However, she certainly doesn't bid him to become female. That comes later.) Heathcote Williams, himself a notable playwright, overenunciates amusingly as Greene, the Elizabethan literary malcontent, and in a witty casting maneuver, Greene also appears later as a modern money-minded publisher. John Wood, exquisite actor, is the Archduke Harry, looking like a Rowlandson cartoon. Charlotte Valandrey, as Sasha, Orlando's Russian light o' love, is enchanting. Billy Zane, as the female Orlando's nineteenth-century lover, here made an American, is a true romantic presence.
Tilda Swinton as Orlando is insufficient. She--here s/he might be permitted--fills the first need: she resembles Vita Sackville-West. Literary history's most open secret is that Orlando was an elegant love letter to Woolf's lesbian inamorata. (Three of the photographs in the book, supposedly of Orlando, are in fact of Sackville-West.)
Swinton has subtlety--her line readings are sometimes almost chordal, freighted with more than one meaning. But she has no whiff of fire. This is a drastic loss in a character who, as male or female, goes lovemaking through the ages. Swinton's declarations of passion-- for people, for poetry, for life-- come right from the refrigerator.
Potter's directing often has freshness. At the very start she gives us a hint of it. The Elizabethan Orlando is striding back and forth under a great tree (the same tree under which the film ends), and Potter's camera, at a fair distance, moves counter to Orlando's striding, gliding left when he goes right and vice versa. She keeps him centered on the screen, but she avoids tracking him tritely.
Potter's decision to have Orlando occasionally play to the camera is in fact the closest that the film comes to the invitations of the book. The way that Potter takes Orlando through an immense maze in a formal garden, to emerge radically changed, has humor and verve.
But for all of this, for all the splendid costumes and the magnificence of such sequences as the festival on the frozen Thames, the film just keeps reaching and hoping.