Girl Week: Orlando

Every year, Dell over at Dell on Movies hosts his "Girl Week" blogathon, which is a fairly simply blogathon to join. As Dell writes:

If you're not familiar with Girl Week, it's that time of year when we focus on women in movies. You can join the fun by posting or talking about films with females in the lead, directed by women, or feature women in some other prominent role (cinematography, special fx, etc.) on your own blog or channel or whatever during that week, using any of the banners in this post (or create your own with all the relevant info), or mentioning this blog, and leaving me the link here.

With that in mind, I still have a couple of movies on my DVR from last year's Women Make Film series on TCM, which spotlighted 100 different female directors, and watched Sally Potter's 1992 film Orlando.

Based on a novel by Virginia Woolf, the movie tells the story of Orlando (Tilda Swinton), who at the start of the movie is a sort of courtier to Queen Elizabeth I in an era when, as Orlando says, all the men wanted to look feminine, as was the style of the time. This is near the end of the virgin queen's reign, and she bequeaths some property to Orlando, telling him not to fade, wither, or grow old.

Amazingly enough, Orlando doesn't do any of those things. Fast forward 10 years, and Orlando looks fresh as a daisy, falling in love with the beautiful Princess Sasha, part of an diplomatic group from Muscovy. Unfortunately, Sash is going to have to go home when the ice on the Thames unfreezes and they can get the boat back to Russia. Despite Orlando's protestations, Sasha does indeed leave.

Next we jump ahead to 1650, with Orlando being a patron of the arts who is looking for a poet to sponsor so that he can ridicule the poet for his poor poetry. Move on to 1700, and now Orlando is an ambassador to some place in the Near East where he meets a dashing Khan. But that friendship, too, is going to have to end as the Khan's city is besieged. More interestingly, Orlando wakes up from this episode as a woman (which of course would explain why Tilda Swinton would play the male Orlando in the first half of the movie.

We get another episode in 1750 in which she meets Jonathan Swift (an anachronism as Swift had died in 1745), Alexander Pope (ditto; Pope died in 1744), and Samuel Johnson. More noteworthy here is that Orlando is starting to face legal problems as he/she is supposed to be dead, having produced no heirs to inherit that lovely manor house Elizabeth I had bequeathed Orlando 150 years earlier. There's an episode in 1850 in which Orlando meets an American man (Billy Zane) and definitely loses the house because of inheritance laws not letting women inherit the property, and finally a coda in the present day in which Orlando still looks the same age.

Orlando is an interesting enough premise, and well-enough photographed. But I think there's something wrong in the translation of the material from book to screen (although I admit to not having read the book). It felt to me as though all of the segments were given short shrift, and Orlando's dilemma over how to keep remaking him/herself since everybody else around has to grow old and die at some point. (I did like that at least the legal issues were discussed.) And Orlando seems surprisingly equanimeous about suddenly waking up as a woman.

Still, the interesting premise, the nice cinematography, and Swinton's good performance, doing the best she can do with the script, make Orlando worth at least one watch.