Mrs. Woolf's aims were to capture in the amber of her prose the flightiness of her lover, and make Miss Sackville-West forever her own; to convey an overview of the changing roles of men, women, and artists through 350 years (the poet Orlando never ages over that period, merely turns from a somewhat feminine man into a slightly masculine woman), and to make a guarded plea for lesbianism, for if the artist's nature is androgynous, his or her amours must logically be bisexual. And although Orlando is one of Mrs. Woolf's markedly lesser works, it nevertheless abounds in subtle social, historical, and psychological observation with which the movie will have minimal truck.
Indeed, Sally Potter's film is not even as faithful to its sources as Classic Comix are to theirs. It could be described as illustrations torn from the book, with a few captions clinging to their bottoms. Miss Potter's protagonist is not truly a poet, and not much of a literary debater. Nor is he/she Vita Sackville-West, even if one or two key incidents from Vita's vita are preserved. And there are no Woolfian complexities: illustrations, even with captions, do not lend themselves to harboring ambiguities, however much Tilda Swinton, who plays Orlando, affects her version of the Gioconda smile. But Miss Potter's feminist politics are grafted on everywhere.
"How you could have hung so splendid a garment on so poor a peg," marveled Miss Sackville-West upon reading her beloved's tribute. On Vita's part, this was modesty, real enough but exaggerated. Yet it describes accurately how Miss Potter, the writer-director, must have viewed the novel--as a mere peg on which to hang her cinematic splendors. Although shot on locations in England, St. Petersburg, and Uzbekistan, the film might as well have been made in a studio. It has the suffocating artiness of the recent British cinema of Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman; if it does not quite sink to their level of perversity, neither does it have much of its own to replace it with.
Since many of the settings, though real locations, are not exactly the ones called for, there is often a sense of the edges of the shot being masked, of concealment via artful camera angles, Procrustean lighting, or tricky editing. Location shooting ends up looking like matte shots. To be sure, a $4-million budget is quite an achievement these days, but a financial rather than artistic one. An achievement, too, is Miss Potter's co-composing the film's score, though it would be a greater one if the score amounted to something.
You can see that Miss Potter was trained as a dancer, for the film often looks more choreographed than directed. Accordingly, the most memorable scene is the nocturnal skating party on the (supposititious) Thames, frozen over. Here the male Orlando meets Sasha, the Muscovite ambassador's flirty married daughter--a character based on Violet Trefusis, with whom Miss Sackville-West had one of her steamiest affairs. But since the roman à clef aspects of the story no longer produce the frissons they held for 1928 readers, and since Mrs. Woolf's style is also (in part unavoidably) jettisoned, what remains is a mere traversal of lavender-scented album leaves.
Tilda Swinton never made me believe her as a man, or respond to her as a woman. There is something watery about the Scottish actress, the washed-out coloring of typical redheads giving her a piscine quality; she is certainly not what Mrs. Woolf called Miss Sackville-West in her diary, "a grenadier; hard, handsome, manly." And though not a bad actress, she is not gifted enough to make up for what nature and Miss Potter have failed to provide her with. Queen Elizabeth in her early sixties is played by Quentin Crisp in his early eighties, and the effect is less crisp than creepy. Several good English or Canadian actors are not given enough chance to act, and the American Billy Zane is painful as the American adventurer Shelmerdine, who fathers the female Orlando's child. Meant to be the essence of exotic seductiveness, Zane suggests a minor rock musician trying to act suave. Only John Wood, as Archduke Harry, manages to be outrageous with just the right touch of nonchalance.