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”.

Poor Things: Bonkers genius film targets the patriarchy

Yorgos Lanthimos – he of the postmodern film movement known as Greek Weird Wave – has done it again. The creative force of nature behind The Lobster and The Favourite has now given us Poor Things, based on the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, and it’s pretty much off the scale in terms of weirdness.

A science fantasy black comedy, it tells the story of Bella Baxter, a well-to-do pregnant suicide in Victorian London, who is brought back to life – à la Frankenstein – by surgeon Dr Godwin ‘God’ Baxter, who replaces her damaged brain with that of her unborn child before rebooting her electronically.

Bella begins a new life with no memories of her previous one, in a fully formed adult body, but with a child’s mind that is developing at an extraordinary rate. However, she is completely unpolluted by social and patriarchal conditioning. So when she discovers female sexual pleasure, for instance, there is no shame whatsoever attached and she has an absolute openness to that – and other new experiences.

Godwin has attempted to keep her hidden, but his new assistant, medical student Max McCandles, becomes besotted with her, even as her rapid mental development makes her ever harder to control. So Godwin eventually consents to let her run off with a cad, lawyer Duncan Wedderburn, to find adventure.

This is stunning to look at, with a strong steampunk aesthetic, and all about how men do/try to police women’s bodies, sexual behaviour and agency. Every male character (and one female one) try to control Bella. It’s not always about control from a deliberately cruel perspective – it can be motivated by a need to feel protective, by genuine romantic feelings or a wish to educate philosophically – but some of the relationships are based entirely on controlling the “territory” of a woman.

Lanthimos’s film is one heck of a way to explore this. Do not watch if you are bothered by a lot of nudity (and yes, that includes male nudity) and a lot of explicit sex scenes, though these are absolutely not pornographic.

It was my longest watch for some time, but held me gripped throughout. Tony McNamara’s screenplay is excellent. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography is incredibly inventive, helping creating a real sense of a world turned upside down.

As I write this, I’m streaming Jerskin Fendrix’s fascinating, astringent soundtrack to the film.

Holly Waddington's costume design is brilliant, capturing a sense of Bella's development and liberation in a way that still feels Victorian/steampunk, while production designers James Price and Shona Heath deserve massive plaudits too.

And then we come to the cast. First – and because I don’t like to do spoilers, you’ll just have to go and see the film to find out who these actors play – praise for supporting cast members Christopher Abbott, Jerrod Carmichael, Hanna Schygulla and Suzy Bemba. Kathryn Hunter is stunning in her small role here – as you would expect, given her CV.

On to the leads. Willem Dafoe as Godwin brings real nuance to a role that, in lessor hands would – could – be very clunky and unsympathetic. Ramy Youssef as Max is charmingly naive, yet his performance always feels genuine. 

Mark Ruffalo is a (surprising) delight as Wedderburn, finding his own libertine morals turned utterly on their head by – say it quietly – a woman.

And then we come to Bella herself, played by Emma Stone. Wow. And wow again. What an extraordinary, utterly fearless performance. Just extraordinary. Simply sensational. Bella Baxter is my new household god(dess). We all knew Stone is a class act, but this is taking it to stratospheric levels.

It’s absolutely bonkers – and it’s absolute genius. I saw it today at a Curzon members’ preview. It opens in the UK on 12 January. With the provisos I laid out above – see it.