Writer-director Sally Potter liberates Virginia Woolf's 1928 book from the dutiful dust of scholarship. Hip, sexy and wickedly funny, Orlando dazzles your senses and breaks your heart. It's a masterpiece, though the word sounds daunting for something so buoyant. Potter speaks to a new generation in a torrent of images that are gloriously alive. Orlando (made for $4 million) should be the hottest Brit sleeper since The Crying Game and propel Potter into the front ranks of directors.
As the film begins, Orlando sits under a tree on his family estate. A voice-over says, "There could be no doubt about his sex"-- a statement that invites us to join Potter's jest, as do the conspiratorial asides that Orlando makes to the audience. There's also mischief in the genderbending casting of author Quentin Crisp as Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, who makes Orlando her mascot. Crisp, 83, brings humor and a touching dignity to the role. "Come, your handsome leg," says the aged queen, snapping a deed into Orlando's garter that will give him the gift of land and immortality. "Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old."
Orlando's property and the power it implies-- British colonialism in miniature-- drive the film, which Potter lays out in a series of vignettes. In 1610, Orlando falls for Sasha (sexy Charlotte Valandrey), the daughter of the Muscovite ambassador. It is the year of the Great Frost, when grand banquets were held on the frozen Thames. Shot in St. Petersburg by the Russian cinematographer Alexei Rodionov, who performs wonders throughout, the river scenes have a beauty that pierces the heart. Bundled up on a sled, Orlando removes Sasha's glove. You can almost feel the chill on her fingers as Orlando warms them with a kiss. But when Sasha betrays Orlando, he bemoans "the treachery of women" and takes to his bed.
When he wakes, it is 1650, a time in which he struggles vainly to be a poet. In 1700, he is in Asia, forced into a battle that he staggers from in horror. When he wakes again, it is 1750, and Orlando's mirror reflects a naked woman. "Same person," Orlando tells us, "just a different sex." Potter is doing more than tweaking the gender games we play. As a woman, Orlando finds it's not just the corseted gowns and sexist comments from the literary lions of the day that constrict her. Orlando is legally dead and can't own property. She is also female, which she is told "amounts to the same thing."
Warned by the archduke Harry (John Wood) that she'll end up a dispossessed spinster if she doesn't marry him, a furious Orlando runs into a garden maze. When she emerges in 1850, she meets Shelmerdine (a dashing Billy Zane), an American with whom she shares her first sex as a woman. He dares her to run off, to be "unfettered." She savors the word but won't budge. Orlando is pregnant, and with a son she can keep her house.
In the final section, Orlando gives birth to a daughter and finds her destiny and her independence. Along the way, Potter skewers the follies of history (the magnificent costumes and sets are witty accomplices). But it's in the humanity of history that Potter discovers hope.
Woolf dedicated her book to her bisexual lover, the author Vita Sackville-West, who as a woman could not inherit the estate deeded to her family by Elizabeth I. It doesn't matter a damn if you know this; the film stands on its own. But in her diary, Woolf wrote of the exhilaration she felt in hearing Vita talk: "All the centuries seemed lit up, the past expressive, articulate; not dumb and forgotten." In Orlando, Potter illuminates history in a way that teaches us to learn from the past without clinging to it. She's made the first great movie of 1993, a thrilling fantasia that lights the way ahead.