Customer Reviews

Orlando (Widescreen)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Finally got this one on DVD after nearly wearing out my VHS copy. Sally Potter is one of the best directors and of course Tilda Swinton in the title role is mesmerizing in every way. Although a sharp departure from Virginia Woolf's source material, it retains the spirit and scope of the novel. Orlando's tranformation from man to woman half way through is a beautiful moment. Swinton proudly naked and observing herself in the mirror looks directly into the camera and says "no difference really, just a different sex" it brilliantly blurs the line between what it means to be a man and woman. And when I say blur, I mean it in a good way. The gender, sexual orientation and race lines all need to be blurred until they disappear. Orland is a good salvo in that war.

This telling of Virginia Woolf's tale is a sweeping epic of grace and beauty.
There could not have been a better choice to portray the gender swapping Orlando than Tilda Swinton. She lights up the screen with her beauty, grace and subtle wit. As a young man nervously reciting poetry to Queen Elizabeth, or a modern woman raising a young daughter, she embraces the audience and pulls us fully into her world. The settings, costumes and music serve to construct a world of changing ages spinning around a single soul in flux.
Orlando is an astounding piece of cinema history and deserves a place of honor in any DVD library.

Whether it was a mystical experience to watch because it pulled me out of the boredom of a dreary Sunday morning when it appeared on IFC, or whether it really is one of the most fascinating and hauntingly photographed films ever made...well, the jury is still out, and in fact it's probably both reasons. But I quickly obtained my own copy and have waited to watch it again because I so badly want to share this movie with someone. But it's a rare breed that will appreciate the story of a man who over time turns into a woman---a human being who tells a story of pain and obsession, heartache, war, and finally fulfillment in the truest love possible, across five centuries of different lives/same soul. A beautiful and artful rendition of the novel. I can't wait to unwrap mine one day and share it with the right friend... Could become an underground intellegentsia cult classic. (If it hasn't already and I'm really out of the loop.)

No lover in the world ever wrote a valentine more exquisite than Virginia Woolf's tribute to her lover Vita Sackville-West, "Orlando."

And few movie adaptations are as coyly, exquisitely lovely as the 1992 movie adapted from that book, a magical-realism tale about a perpetually youthful, charming hero/ine who traverses three centuries and both genders. Tilda Swinton has the right combination of androgyny and intelligence to perfectly embody Orlando, and director Sally Potter gilds and perfumes every set and costume.

Orlando (Swinton) was born a young aristocratic man in the time of Queen Elizabeth I, and when the dying monarch visited his home she became his new court favorite. She also bid him, "Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old."

And Orlando did as she said. With the death of the queen and his father, Orlando's passionate, curious personality attracted many women -- and during the Great Freeze he fell in love with Sasha, a mercurial Russian princess (Charlotte Valandrey) who enthralled him, but left him as he ice began to thaw. Bereft of true love, he devoted himself to poetry and entertainment.

But then he's assigned to be an ambassador to Constantinople, and something strange happens -- while a bloody revolution rages, he sleeps for a full week... and wakes newly metamorphosed into a woman. With the same mind and soul but a female body, Orlando sets out on a new life of poetry (befriending Pope!), sex and legality, stretching all the way to the twentieth century -- when she finally finds peace.

"Orlando" is a treat for the senses, filled with showers of gold dust, luxuriant flowers, pale sunlight, golden sands, cities veiled in ice, dark rivers, snowy forests and mist-filled hedge mazes. It feels like Sally Potter took Woolf's beautiful book and sprinkled it with roses, gold and crystals -- and it just adds a suitably magical atmosphere to a already unreal story.

The center of all this is Swinton, who plays Orlando in both incarnations, and she's utterly brilliant. Her androgynous features and slim body mean she can pass for both a man and a woman, and she manages to carry both genders off beautifully -- she captures gangly boyish grace, sleek femininity, and a sort of chummy male attitude with equal skill.

And she captures Orlando's elusive personality. Her Orlando is all puckish charm, sweetness and unleashed passion -- even to the audience. While watching a street performance of "Othello," he glances at the camera and whispers, "Terrific play!", as if we're trailing after him over the centuries.

And as I mentioned, Potter does a brilliant job with a very difficult book, sticking faithfully to most of Woolf's novel and adding a shimmering, silken atmosphere to it. There are lots of beautiful scenes that could have stepped out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, and she deftly handles the passing centuries by having Orlando sprint through walls of mist. The ending is slightly different from Woolf's novel, but it has the same pleasantly timeless, thoughtful quality -- the only downside is that weird freaky angel thing. WHAT was that about?

Fortunately, the freaky angel thing is the one downside in "Orlando," a timelessly sensual movie that perfectly highlights Tilda Swinton. Absolutely stunning.

Sally Potter is one of the few directors to achieve the near impossible - to create a movie that actually surpasses the original novel.

Not wishing to take anything away from Virginia Woolf, whose The Waves is one of the most brilliant and defining novels of all time, Potter's film version is nothing less than a work of art.

As other reviewers have indicated, when the Orlando character, who was based on Woolf's friend and lover, Victoria (Vita) Sackville-West, crosses gender to become a woman, she automatically loses the right to own the very same property that, as a man, she/he had owned for eons. Even as a socio-political commentary, (see also Woolf's A Room Of One's Own) this speaks volumes about a patriarchal society in which the lowliest, most moronic male had infinitely more rights than the most brilliant and gifted female.

Our society is still dealing with the legacy of the tyranny of gender and the legacy of the Inquisition, in which nine million women were murdered for being women.

Yet despite the dark insanities that underly the film's pivotal transition, Potter's modern classic is a rich and joyful romp, filled with love, hope and transcendence, with a simply breathtakingly beautiful closing section.

A rare and inspired work of genius, in which the production direction and casting cannot be faulted.

This is one really odd movie, I've never seen anything quite like it. I found the story interesting but strange at the same time. I'm not sure how historically accurate it is but the movie seems very well researched and loaded with tiny details that could so easily have been over looked or even left out, much better done than so many modern day setting movies. The plot mostly made sense to me although the passage of time seems dreamlike in later stages. I really liked the locations and costumes, weird as they were I think the clothing was probably exactly right for the times, remarkable achievement for what I think was actually a low budget movie.

Orlando is one of the best indies I've seen in years. It differs from the book but its a good differance. Tilda Swenson is fantastic in the lead role and Quinten Qrisp has a fine turn as Queen Victoria. It is beautifly photographed and has great costumes and set design. It has a very easy flow to it that allows the viewer to progress with the character as she lives through differant eras of English society and has a slight and attractive sexual undertone that is not expolitive and is very nessessary to the story. IT WILL CAST A SPELL OVER THE VIEWER

First of all, I have to say that I have not read Virginia Woolf's book on which this film is based. Ms. Woolf is not an "easy read", as her style tends to ramble a bit, and from what I understand, one could not literally translate "Orlando" to the screen. I commend Sally Potter for her adaptation of Woolf's novel. "Orlando", to me, is about a person's journey of self-discovery. As the lead character says, "The same person-just a different sex." There is a wonderfully sly mixing-up and playing with gender here. Orlando, an effeminate male poet who later becomes a woman, is beautifully underplayed by Tilda Swinton. I admire her performance, as it is played with a very subtle wit. Queen Elizabeth I is portrayed by that grand unwilling champion of gay rights Quentin Crisp, and the beautiful Billy Zane is treated as the "love object" in two scenes of lush sensuality. "Bronsky Beat"'s Jimmy Somerville, with his famous falsetto voice is here too, as a singing angel at the film's finale. His song, "Coming", is wonderful, stating that gender doesn't really matter here-"I am coming, I am coming, here I am, neither a woman nor a man." The art direction is breathtakingly beautiful, and Sandy Powell's costumes are remarkably accurate, spanning the centuries from Elizabethan thru Jacobean thru Rococo thru Victorian to present-day. Some may find the pace of this gorgeous film a little ponderous, but I found it to be an intriguing 90 minutes. We are all humans, individuals-why all this fuss about what a "woman's" role in society is, or what a "man's" role in society is? Virginia Woolf, I understand, based "Orlando" on a meeting she had with an Italian noblewoman who bemoaned the fact that she was denied her inheritance due to the fact that she was born a woman. Almost unbelievable, isn't it?

This is an amazing, ironic film, based upon Virginia Woolf's whimsically mock-serious epic about an immortal English lord, who experiences 400 years of history, changes his sex to that of a woman after refusing to participate in warfare (a feminist point that is subtly made), and never bores or condescends to us. What surprised me when I first saw it is how dry, boring and pompous it isn't; the film has a nice lightness and dry humor that make it digestible. The photography is beautiful and the film never drags, and the performances, which a lot of critics have suggested are somewhat two-dimensional, are that way for a reason: Orlando's adventure is too awesome to be rendered realistically; the people and adventures she experiences are meant, I think, to be represented symbolically---each character is actually a rough composite of perhaps hundreds of such types she meets in her journey from 1600 to 2000. Billy Zane, who is seen in the movie's poster, plays an American adventurer who romances the female Orlando, but to all of his "Titanic" fans, a word of caution: he's in the film for roughly twenty-five minutes, if that much. The real star of the show is the ethereally lovely, brilliant, and mysterious Tilda Swinton, whose male Orlando is unnervingly convincing; so much so that "he" almost seems to be doing a drag bit once the sex change happens---and because Swinton is so eye-pleasing and delightful, this is not a bad thing. Her intelligence and talent radiate from her face, which is so expressive that many shots consist simply of gigantic closeups of it---she can say more with a gaze than many lesser performers do with a page of dialogue. I first saw this film in 1993, as an exchange student living in London, and it gave me an appreciation for British history and for Woolf's books that I had never had before. It's really quite a smart, funny, cool, hip movie, but with no explosions, car chases, or hot-button themes, it's by no means a populist-type entertainment. If you like period films, or anything English, you'll dig this a lot: Orlando isn't just English, he/she *is* England, and the country should be so lucky as to be compared with Tilda Swinton's long-suffering (centuries of it, in fact, what a burden) poetry-spouting nobleman/woman. Very cool.

While Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando' was found, by some readers, to be both long-winded and unbelievable, the movie version is, as a whole, a satire of the novel. The director has taken liberties galore with the original tale (Jimmy Sommerville as a disco queen obviously never figured in the original draft) but despite that, 'Orlando' turns out to be one of the better book-to-film adaptations I have seen, and as much as I hate to say it, I found it to be even better than the book. The novel lacked a certain life, and though Woolf did her best to enliven things up (the latter half of the work was dreary and pointless), Sally Potter, the director, strings things in such a fashion, that the end of the film is a) nothing like the book and b) lifts the movie to higher heights. We owe the way this film works to Tilda Swinton of course, the English actress who made a stunning impression with this film and then left us high and dry by shunning mainstream production altogether.

Other reviews will tell you what 'Orlando' is all about. What I wanted to dwell on are the qualities of the film that make it outstanding. There are noticeable flaws, of course, because the movie doesnt flow together as a consolidated piece. It is broken and jarring in places - a collection of amusing vignettes strung together - but at the end of two hours, 'Orlando' comes together unlike many a film of its genre. For a film of this sort to make an impact on the audience, it must first goad the audience into leaving their sense of probability behind. Orlando's most defining moment comes when he lies himself down and arises a woman - breasts and all. I know not of any person in modern history who has altered their sex simply by will, and hence could not accept this shift in gender totally, yet this is one of the most gripping sequences in the film. Its also relieving because Tilda Swinton can finally play herself and get rid of that phony masculine accent.

Orlando still lives, according to the movie, so that would make him/her about 420 years old at the moment. The focus of the film is not so much the years that Orlando lives through, but rather the lessons she learns along the way. Why, for instance, did the Lord Orlando decide to 'become' a woman? Was this of his own choosing? Orlando's bitter experiences with war and death make him question his own masculinity, or one would suppose, as it is just after this that he changes his sex. But both as a man and as a woman, Orlando faces rejection. As a man, he is spurned by a Russian ambassodress, and as a woman, she involves herself in a torrid affair (with some of the most thoughtful dialogue) with Billy Zane, and he leaves her for America almost immediately. Pregnant, and doomed to be a 'spinster', Orlando survives World War I and II and is left with child when the film ends. This is all grossly improbable, but it works.

Tilda Swinton's direct camera glances are at first amusing, but I suppose they do add a sort of artistic touch to the proceedings. The final moments of the film benefit hugely from Tilda's beatific gaze, assuring the film of instant classic status, and making 'Orlando' one of the most thoughtful transgender films ever made. This is art.