Actress Tilda Swinton manages to be both androgynous and seductive as Orlando, a young man who wakes up as a woman one 18th century day and dryly addresses the camera to say: "Same person, no difference at all--just a different sex." Quentin Crisp, in drag, plays Queen Elizabeth I and takes time to fondle Orlando, who is clearly more interested in a worldly Russian beauty named Sasha (Charlotte Valandrey). Later, in Victorian England, the female Orlando rides off on horseback with a swashbuckling American adventurer (played dashingly by Billy Zane).
At the brainteasing climax of his/her career as a nobleman, poet, foreign ambassador, lover, author and mother, Orlando shows up whizzing through modern London astride a motorcycle. Familiarity with the book may help to explain it all. But don't bet on it, just go for it. Questions about life, love, sexual identity and self-discovery are scattered like confetti through Potter's vibrant Orlando--a cinematic somersault of spectacular dimensions.