Review of Orlando, directed by Sally Potter

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

A series I’ve been working on for the blog is going back to movies I watched a while ago. All the way back in college I wanted to be a film critic, even though I was a business student, and I even managed to find my way into the Film Criticism coursework that was open only to film majors. I was writing little reviews for myself and never published them.

I’ve been chipping away at all of these old reviews and adding them onto the blog, as this creates a more permanent home for them. I keep this blog mainly as a digital archive, although I do make a few pennies here and there off of the display ads that hover in the corners and in-between paragraphs. It mainly pays to keep this website alive though.

Anyways, Orlando is a movie I saw back in college. I watched it for my fashion history in film course, which was taught by Raissa Bretana (you might recognize her for her fashion history series for Glamour), and we had to watch Orlando as one of our contemporary movie options. I ended up reading the novel by Virginia Woolf many years later after graduate school, which has been a full circle moment.

Let’s get into the review!

An English nobleman wakes up one day to find our they are now a woman—and immortal.

In this movie, we meet our main character, Orlando, during the Elizabethan period. He is a nobleman in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, who is is actively dying. The Elizabethan period is a golden age in English history, but it is about to come to an end in 1603.

Orlando comes to see Elizabeth as she lays dying, and she tells him this: she is going to give him a large piece of land and a castle, but there’s a catch: Elizabeth says he is not allowed to grow old or fade. This message is unclear at first, but when he goes to his castle, he discovers he is now immortal and does not age.

The castle is large and isolated enough that no one has to question why exactly Orlando has not aged at all throughout the years. He spends his days grazing and lazing about, writing poetry and other literary forms, while also creating art about the lives he has lived. However, things start to go south when he invites a poet he admires into his home, and the poet says his poetry and verses are not good.

Orlando decides to become an ambassador after that, and is sent to the Ottoman Empire. When he has to confront war and death for the first time, he flees a battle, but then wakes up seven days after the fact and discovers he has now a woman.

While Orlando accepts her new form, when she returns home to England it unravels everything she had dear. People are now fighting for her estate because they say because she was a woman this entire time, she was not allowed to have land or the queen’s money. That was only granted to her because she was a man, which was English law at the time.

Orlando continues to fight through the courts for her rights, as she now knows the injustices of being a woman, and we follow her throughout the decades as she tries to find love and then find her place in the world. She does have a daughter eventually, giving her the gift of motherhood as she experiences the world, and eventually we end up in the present day of the movie.

She is tired of all of the wars and conflict in England, and now she wants to write a book. She’s hunting around for a publisher, and the editor, who is played by the same actor as the poet from the beginning) tells her that this manuscript has something very good in it. The film ends with Orlando and her daughter looking at an angel.

Overall Thoughts

This is such an incredible movie if you’re interested in women and gender studies, or even fashion. Lots of fabulous costumes seen throughout this movie, which is definitely why my professor made us watch this film all those years ago. We had quite a bit to analyze in the end.

Anyways, there are critiques of gender norms throughout the film, and even Queen Elizabeth I is portrayed by a male actor. Having read both the novel and the film, there are distinct differences between the two, but I feel like Woolf’s intent has transformed and modernized with this adaptation of the film.

I liked this one a lot—let’s say that. I think it’s an important movie to watch, and that everyone who’s interested in it should watch the movie at least once. It can be tricky to find at times, but trust me, it’s worth it. Tilda Swinton alone is magnificent in this role and commands the screen.

So go see it if you haven’t already. Movies are meant to be seen, not read about, after all.

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