A Film of One's Own

By RICHARD CORLISS PARIS

Civilization aspires to femininity. History has made man's age-old tools of muscles and marauding nearly obsolete; it urges him to put down swords and pick up phones, to value salon charm over brute force, to face adversity through nurturing and networking instead of a quick body chop. What a lovely evolution: men are becoming women. Except in movies, of course -- especially summer movies, where the O.K. Corral never closes and the footfalls of dinosaurs named Arnold and Sly still shake the earth.

So raise a tender toast to Orlando: a sensation at film festivals, a hit in Britain, and, once it opens in the U.S. next week, a bracing corrective to the cinema's annual testosterone overdose. Freely and fondly adapting Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel, English filmmaker Sally Potter brings to life a buoyant fantasy world. She imparts a brisk, lush post-modernism to a fable that scans four centuries. But Potter's real triumph is in her pert dressing of an immodest proposal. To be fully human, Orlando says, is to go civilization one better: to be man, then woman, then a blend of the best of both genders. To the battle of the sexes, androgyny is the answer supplied by both Potter and Woolf. "In so many ways," the director says, "Woolf was ahead of her time. Or maybe she was just timeless."

In 1600 Queen Elizabeth (Quentin Crisp) deeds a great English manor to handsome young Lord Orlando (Tilda Swinton) on one condition: "Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old." The lad takes the monarch's admonition to heart and, miraculously, ages not at all from that day to this. Orlando is a fellow in love with love -- ever eager to die upon a kiss, but destined to live forever apart from those mortals he cherishes. In 1610 he falls for a fickle Russian princess (Charlotte Valandrey). One day, a century and a half later, he wakes up and is a woman. The new Lady Orlando has her first fulfilling affair in 1850 with an American adventurer (Billy Zane) and finally, with the American's daughter at her side, faces the new millennium unshackled to the past. Her life is just beginning.

The novel Orlando, inspired by Woolf's love for Vita Sackville-West, is a gay lark disguised as a historical biography. Centuries and genders fly past, each one bending like a willow to accommodate Woolf's puckish feminist insight and hindsight. Potter's movie, faithful in spirit to the book, is something else. It is, in the best sense, a travesty, a masquerade, a cross-dressing comedy of eros. Yet moviegoers do believe in Orlando, in the breadth of its canvas, the immediacy of its emotions, the palliative power of its wit. They can swim in its gorgeous images: the fruit seen below a sheath of ice, the oars dipping into dark water, the fearful maiden rushing between high hedges and across battlefields. They surely believe in Swinton as the pearl and perfection of any gender; her poise and gravity, and the drama of her pale face under a crown of red hair, could mark her as this generation's russet Redgrave. Orlando proves anything is possible in movies if artists can make it plausible.

Getting it made is another matter; it's not easy to finance a film of one's own when one is a woman. Potter, 43, wrote her Orlando treatment in 1984 but found no takers. "Investors," she says, "often have trouble believing that a woman can handle large sums of money and lead a team, that she has a sufficiently firm hand." So Potter directed for TV: the series Tears, Laughter, Fear and Rage (1986) and a 1988 documentary on Soviet women. Still, she says, "Orlando wouldn't leave me alone. So five years ago, I got my script out and said, 'I don't care how long it takes or what it costs me -- I'm going to make this film.' You must be utterly in love with filmmaking to get beyond all the crazy obstacles." She raised the $4 million budget from Russian, French, Italian, Dutch and British sources, then shot the film in Saint Petersburg, Uzbekistan and a mansion built in 1611 for the Earl of Salisbury.

That's a lot of sweat for one movie. So why Orlando? "Woolf created a believable, sensual world within an unrealistic story," Potter says. "In a light way, she dealt with some profound themes. Orlando's long life as a man, and then as a woman, lets you appreciate the essential human self that transcends genders. She just blows away the cobwebs of mystique about masculinity and femininity. When I first read the book, as a teenager, I found it such an exuberant liberation from any false notion of femaleness. And Orlando's 400-year life-span -- it's a wonderful device for looking at the melancholy of mortality. I was a child growing up under the shadow of a possible nuclear holocaust; now I see young people growing up under the shadow of aids. We have a bittersweet feeling of living in the moment, knowing that shortly that moment will be gone forever. Woolf says it is important to value the intensity of your life as it is lived just now."

Just now Potter is ecstatic at her film's success and artfully dodging questions about gender roles in filmmaking. "When I'm working," she says, "I don't feel male or female. After all, what did Virginia Woolf call the mind of the artist? 'The androgynous mind.' " Say, then, that anyone -- man or woman or a new, improved species -- could have made Orlando. But until Sally Potter, nobody did. Nobody dared.

With reporting by Carrie Ross Welch/London