Orlando – throughly entertaining queerness

It was time for another spot of film catch-up this evening – and back to an effort at being thematic for LGBT+ History Month – with a first viewing of Sally Potter’s 1992 adaptation of Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel of the same name.

The film opens in 1600, with aristocratic youth Orlando pondering over his loneliness and his desire to write poetry. When his family is visited by Elizabeth I, the aged monarch takes to him, making him her “mascot” and granting him property and money. There’s one condition: “Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old”, she orders.

In the novel, there is no explanation of how Orlando becomes immortal, but Potter added this to the film to suggest how this occurs, feeling that a cinema audience would need at least a hint.\

As part of the wider court of James I, he becomes utterly besotted with Sasha, a beautiful Cossack, who is visiting with her father. But when she dumps him, he’s left to muse on the “treachery” of women.

Time passes and, in the 18^th century, the eternally unchanging Orlando – nobody ever comments on this, ‘because it’s England’ – is appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. There he enjoys a brotherly friendship with the Khan, before participating in a battle.

Shocked at seeing his first violent death, he flees and falls into a deep sleep for seven days. On waking, he discovers that he has become a she. Heading back to England, Orlando is stripped of her home on the basis of being a woman – and thus effectively “legally dead”.

Somehow, she continues living there until the time of Victoria, where she has an accidental meeting with Shelmerdine, an American revolutionary, with whom she enjoys a passionate fling, before he departs for home. She refuses to join him – and muses on the “treachery” of men – before her life takes her into the 20^th century, through the mud of Flanders and beyond, to 1990s London, where she has a young daughter.

It's not a devastating script, but there is wit – not least in the wonderful to-camera shots of Tilda Swinton as Orlando, where Potter has her break the fourth wall.

It is beautifully shot – cinematography was by Alexsei Rodionov – and beyond Swinton’s fabulous performance, which really grounds the film, it has a wonderful ensemble cast.

Billy Zane posts a nice turn as Shelmerdine, but one of the real joys here is Quentin Crisp as Elizabeth I – “the Queen of Queens”, according to Potter – which also adds to the queerness of the whole thing.

Then there’s Jimmy Sommerville, Kathryn Hunter, Simon Russell Beale and Toby Jones among many other familiar faces, while John Wood provides a delightful cameo as a bumptious, elderly archduke who falls for Orlando.

Potter’s direction moves things at a nice pace – easy to expect an epic, given the century-spanning scale of the story – but it’s just 93 minutes. She also wrote the screenplay and the music (the latter, along with David Motion and, for one song, Sommerville).

It’s thoroughly entertaining – and with the added spice of the gender politics, not least in terms of the differing attitudes toward men and women throughout history.

And as Vogue put it in 2020: “Nearly three decades later, Sally Potter's Orlando is more topical than ever”.