Although the book is a little tedious, it's not difficult to imagine a good film of Orlando: something brisk, lighthearted, and exuberantly silly, with one of Britain's many cross-dressing comedians (Eric Idle, say) in the title role. Potter, however, takes Woolf's exercise in frivolity awfully seriously. This picture (for which Potter also wrote the screenplay) is like a Benny Hill sketch performed with fringe-theatre solemnity. It's designed to the teeth-- by Ben van Os and Jan Roelfs, who are veterans of Peter Greenaway's fussy, ornate pictures-- and the predominant acting is an unpalatable mixture of earnestness and gross, heavy-spirited caricature. The actress who plays Orlando, Tilda Swinton, has previously appeared in several of Derek Jarman's movies-- notably Caravaggio and Edward II-- which are not the sort of productions that instill good habits in a young performer. (Jarman's actors spend most of their time screaming, leering, glaring, and posing "sculpturally" in stylized settings.) Swinton may not actually wink at the audience, but she always looks as if she were about to. And surely it wouldn't have killed her (or Potter) to try a bit harder to persuade us that Orlando is male in the early sequences. When the actress remembers to, she swaggers, rather halfheartedly, or lowers her voice slightly; the sketchiness of her effects makes her performance feel smug and sarcastic rather than truly ironic. The whole picture has an arch, knowing tone that grows more puzzling-- and more irritating-- as the narrative lumbers to its present-day conclusion. What is it, exactly, that the filmmakers think they know? When Orlando is over, all the audience has learned is that androgyny can be as dull as conventional sexuality, and that the cutting edge of British filmmaking-- the haughty aestheticism of directors like Greenaway, Jarman, and Sally Potter-- is duller still.