Orlando

City Paper Grade: A-

by Sam Adams

Sony Pictures Classics GENDER BENDER: Tilda Swinton leads Sally Potter's 1992 film as the sexually fluid immortal.

To watch Sally Potter's Orlando is to be transported back to another time — not the 17th century, where the film begins, or any of the 300-odd years that follow, but 1992, when an art-house movie with a virtual unknown cast could still muster the resources to stage Elizabethan pageantry and cross continents in pursuit of a director's singular vision. As you watch boats filled with flickering candles scud across the water, or a detachment of icebound Russians slide through the snow, it's hard not to feel a sense of longing for a more munificent era.

Tilda Swinton's quasi-immortal, gender-bending noble — a man first, and then, after a brush with the horrors of the battlefield, a woman — may be a figure out of time, but Orlando is heavily indebted to the movies of Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway, directors who played — more inventively, it must be said, than Potter does here — with the hidebound conventions of the period piece. Sandy Powell, who would win the first of several Oscars for Shakespeare in Love, tweaks the breeches and hoop skirts just enough to instill a sense of self-awareness — a glittering, chitinous gown adds an almost futuristic flavor — while still giving audiences their pomp and circumstance.

Loosely adapting Virginia Woolf's novel, Potter splits her story, a tad too neatly, into sections, captioned "Politics," "Society" and so forth. Although Potter taps queer icons to fill key roles — Quentin Crisp as Queen Bess, Bronski Beat's Jimmy Somerville as a falsetto angel — Orlando's politics are fairly subdued, deferring to the sublime opacity of Swinton's performance. In her alabaster androgyny, she personifies the film's bluntly stated thesis: "Same person ... just a different sex."Although Orlando flirts with Billy Zane's ripe-lipped American, who may himself be a sexual flip-flopper, Potter cheekily rewrites the end of Woolf's book so that Orlando ends up alone, with only her writing to sustain her. With anatomy up for grabs, art is the one thing that lasts forever.