Year: 1992
Director: Sally Potter
Actors: Tilda Swinton, Quentin Crisp, Jimmy Somerville, John Bott, Elaine Banham
Language: English
Brief Summary: Bases on the novel by Virginia Woolf. Orlando, a man of ideal nobility starts his search for love, poetry, a place in society and a meaning in life, in and around the court of historical England in the late 16th century. The blessing of eternal life from Queen Elizabeth I enables him a long and deep philosophical quest, accompanied by the features of “noble” English life with a good taste for irony. Both sides of the coin are shown when Orlando, partly fed up and disgusted with how men think and act, returns from his ambassadorship in the Far East as exactly the same person, let alone his sex. Orlando, a woman of ideal nobility continues her journey to realize the truth about life, love, and approaching one’s own sex in the late 18th century England. For one who lived four hundred years and haven’t aged a day, finding humanity’s forgotten need for androgynity as the key to the happiness of her own as well as her daughter’s. Sally Potter’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando not only tells the story on film with brilliant visual design, but also tries to extend the plot as Woolf would have, had she lived to the end of the twentieth century.
