_Orlando_

     Sally Potter's _Orlando_ celebrates surfaces. Here
appearances are not so much deceiving as they are supremely and
precisely superficial. Based on Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel
(which is dedicated to and inspired by her bisexual object of
affection, Vita Sackville-West), the film is an elaborately
ironic ode to the artifice of gender and sexuality (with some
scant attention to class as a function of both). 

     "Different though the sexes are,'' wrote Woolf, "they
intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the
other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the
male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very
opposite of what is above." Though it spans four centuries, the
film never quite examines cultural or even generational changes.
Rather, it focuses on the emotional details of (trans)gendered
differences as experienced by a single androgynous and deathless
character. Throughout, Swinton/Orlando directly addresses the
camera, suggesting that the movie itself is a surface in need of
excavation. 

     In 1600, Orlando (Tilda Swinton) is recognizeable as male
because he rides horses astride, wears tights, can own property,
and is attracted to women. His translucent beauty catches the eye
of Queen Elizabeth I (played with arch resplendence by Quentin
Crisp), who bestows a peculiar fate on him, to never
"fade...wither...[or] grow old." So begins Orlando's carefully
devised journey through time (ordained by titles such as "Death,"
"Poetry," "Politics," and "Society"). 

     The politics of this journey are limited to those imagined
by Woolf (read: those attached to the white upper class). When
Orlando rejects his in-court bethrothed in order to woo a Russian
ambassador's daughter Sasha (Charlotte Valandrey), he is rudely
awakened to the fact that his adoration does not equal ownership.
If this is a useful lesson for him to learn ("Oh, the treachery
of women!" he moans), it is also indicative of the culture's
narrow gender-definitions (to be generous, one must suffer, and
women are those who suffer most egregiously). 

     Rejected by Sasha and proclaimed a bad poet to boot, Orlando
arranges for an ambassadorship to an exotic Eurasian country,
whose leader (Lothaire Bluteau) is himself a kind of macho
androgyne. A gentle and generous host, he sets aside his distrust
of British imperialism when he needs its weapons against his
other, more immediate enemies. It is this "man's work" - war -
that finally impels Orlando's momentous gender-shift: faced with
the necessity of killing, he panics, goes to sleep, and wakes up
a century later as a woman (consigned to wearing big, unwieldy
dresses). 

     When informed that "he" is now dead (or, an aide informs
him, "female, which amounts to the same thing"), Orlando must
decide whether to marry and produce a male heir in order to
maintain "his" property. She can hardly argue with the likes of
Swift and Pope, who offer drawing room observations such as
"Women have no desires, only affectations."

     The film approaches this problem almost imperceptibly. While
it hints that _everyone's_ desires are informed by cultural
conditioning, _Orlando_ offers no sustained critique of romance
per se (or of its attendant affectations). Instead, we see
alternative romances and alternative affectations, so that the
film offers no "opposition" to artifice, only more of it, in
different guises. This smart but cryptic analysis of what passes
for desire and passion is framed with a Jarmonesque stiffness.
The final scenes especially, feel drained of intensity, more like
plot events that need to be illustrated.

     This collapse into brevity is clearest in Lady Orlando's
deliberate escape from the confines of marriage. She meets an
18th-century "sensitive guy," the dashing American adventurer
Shelmerdine (Billy Zane). Their encounter (beginning with a
tandem ride on a white horse, no less) initiates the title "Sex"
and several impeccably composed shots of her porcelain skin
against his relatively ruddy body and whiter-than-white sheets.
They pose in bed, surfaces for the camera even when they wear no
costumes. 

     Enormously witty and incredibly beautiful (again, especially in its
first stunning hour), _Orlando_ stops short of dismantling the gender
oppositions it assumes. For instance, it ignores the considerable
complexities of contemporary transgenderism and sexual continuums.
Instead, its heroine becomes another mini-mosaic of surfaces. Rejecting
Shelmerdine's offer of joint adventures, she moves on to the twentieth
century, gives birth to a child and a book, and takes some solace in the
near-miraculous voice of Jimmy Sommerville.