Orlando
UK/Rus/France/Germany co-production
Director/Screenplay: Sally Potter
Cert: PG 93 mins

THE notion that there is a Gay sensibility has been controverted by some people but this film seems to me to be in a Gay mode – the word ‘tradition’ is too strong at present. Some of the set -pieces at the beginning of Orlando’ s adventures in Elizabethan England reminded one of Paradjanov’ s films spec ially Colour of Pomegranates. Not in their look but in the treatment of the screen as a ‘picture’ (that films started out as “motion pictures” is something that western European and especially British Isles film-makers have tended to forget). The ‘pictures’ here were like those Tudor-period pictures where the subjects all look out at the viewer. The welcome for Queen Elizabeth I to Orlando’s parents house is clearly based on such paint ings – the skating scenes where Orlando waxes rather too familiar with Sasha the Muscovite princess is a bit sneaky, it is more like a Victorian genre painting than the genuine Elizabethan article.

Paradjanov (whose name was Paradjanian, it’Sean Armenian name, but he was born in Georgia and started his career in films in the Ukraine, before going to Moscow! – the joys of [federal] union!) based his images on the art of the Christian Caucasian peopleSeand also to some extent on Islamic art – his images are static like ikons; they are also stunningly beautiful. This film might not be quite so overwhelming for people who live in these isles but it has been very popular in America (and it probably will be in Europe).

So far as the narrative itself is concerned, it is handled quite straight, so the oddities in the original novel by Virginia Woolf are simple taken for granted. And they are very odd oddities, Orlando is granted immortality and in the middle of the eighteenth century changes gender! This is after a period where the “male” Orlando’ s relationship with the local Indian Rajah was less than entirely heterosexual (it is not implied that they were “at it” – but even for the period it is pictured as … unrestrained).

Having become a female Orlando is dragged through the lawcourts because she cannot be the owner of the stately pile we first saw in the 1500s, this case lasts somewhere in the region of 200 years… .Orlando meets a number of Georgian intellectuals, Steele, Swift, Goldsmith and drinks tea with them. A hundred years later she has a fling with Shelmerdine, a Byronic freedom fighter, played by the beautiful Billy Zane. The last few scenes do not ring true – the action is updated to the 1990s, it should have been left in the 1920s.

The director of Orlando is Sally Potter who did Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit for the BBC. As well as the high art mentioned in the first sentence she also employs other aspects of Gay sensibility -camp, for example. Orlando talks straight to the audience like a character from one of the Carry On filmSeand we also have Jimmy Somerville aSean Elizabethan castrato and a 1990Seangel!

Tilda Swinton’s performance as Orlando is amazing, if only because she is not in the least believable as a woman, or as a man.

Orlando is a lovely film to look at, it is funny and sad, has some great performances, an engrossing story and the viewer is not required to gawp at acres of flesh – I wouldn’t have minded a bit more of Billy Zane’s, though!

[RL]