Orlando (1992)

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Tilda Swinton is a female Nicolas Cage with a better batting average. She is almost always the most interesting character in any film she's in, whether she's playing a witch, a lawyer, or a social services worker who may or may not be human. In Orlando, Sally Potter's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's genre-defying novel, Swinton is asked to carry something even stranger than usual: a single character who lives for four centuries and switches sexes halfway through, all while barely aging a day. It's the kind of high-concept role that could collapse under its own cleverness, and the fact that it doesn't is almost entirely down to her.

This film had to be an enormous inspiration for Autumn de Wilde's 2020 Anya Taylor-Joy vehicle Emma. - the arch tableaux, the direct-to-camera glances, the sense that the past is a stage set we're being let in on. Orlando depends so heavily on Swinton's mannered, chameleonic performance that it's worth dwelling on just how much weight she's asked to bear. As the title character, Swinton begins as a young male heir, is commanded by Queen Elizabeth I to never age - and he doesn't - then, after decades spent as a man, wakes up one day as a woman. This is the crux of the film, but it doesn't happen until the start of act three, which is unfortunate, because the idea could've been mined for so much more depth than it ultimately gets.

There's not a ton of forward momentum in this film through most of it. What it leans on instead is Swinton's idiosyncratic expressions and a steady stream of fourth-wall breaks - sidelong glances and asides that, surprisingly, add quite a bit to the character building. They endear us to Orlando, turning the audience into a kind of confidant as he navigates a bewildering stretch of English history, roughly the 1600s through the 1800s, full of customs and social performances that seemed entirely normal at the time but read as absurd theater to us now.

That's where the film's two biggest problems show up: it's kind of boring, and there isn't enough Billy Zane (never thought I'd type that sentence). Orlando isn't a comedy, though it has the bones of one. It leans into the inherent absurdity of English history - the wigs, the rituals, the rigid performance of gender and class -  without quite mining it for laughs. Instead of punchlines, it offers shrugs. Potter seems more interested in irony as atmosphere than as engine.

Orlando's arc as a woman is much shorter than her arc as a man, and the film moves into overdrive trying to cram in the double standards of male versus female life in that era, largely by mirroring beats from Orlando's earlier, male-presenting life in a fraction of the screen time. It's a clever structural idea, but it makes the back half feel rushed precisely when the themes have the most to say. The final time jump into the present day is jarring, and while it sort of works in the film's larger logic - the whole point is that identity outruns any single era - it's not clear the film has earned it dramatically.

Consequently, Orlando is constricted by so much table-setting in its first two-thirds that it doesn't leave itself enough time to fully flesh out the ideas that make it such an interesting expedition into history and gender. It's a film of striking images and a genuinely singular lead performance, undercut by pacing that never quite catches up to its own ambitions.

3 out of 5 Stars