Orlando (559 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.11 on 6 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by whataefag (View user info) at 2006-02-13 17:02:00 EST
The frontispiece for the 1928 edition of Orlando - coincidentally Virginia Woolf's second worst novel and biography - shows a floppy-haired youth of the 16th century, posing in slippers of quite stupefying daftness. The boy is appealing in the kind of way that Oscar Wilde would have us go weak at the knees over, were we well heeled matriarchs; and the slippers - you wouldn't believe quite how daft they are - look to have been each fashioned from six or seven chrysanthemums in full bloom. This then is Orlando at the start of the novel. Tilda Swinton by contrast, spends the first few minutes of the movie of the same name fucking around in daft tights, a dafter hairdo, and slippers of no especial daftness whatsoever. Highly disappointing. Her performance, however, is pre-eminently tolerable, and the casting of Quentin Crisp as Elizabeth I is inspired. Though as Ms Wells points out, it is hard to imagine that Quentin Crisp ever had an actual career beyond just being Quentin Crisp.
Working from a novel, the whole plot leisurely goes through four hundred years and an arbitrary sex change in the writing of a single life. Sally Potter might be seen as having made a notable achievement just bringing this to the screen. Might. While it certainly makes no less sense than the book, and plays in places rather nicely with the novel's own arbitraryness, it still leaves something to be desired. The final few minutes make next to no sense and feature some kind of tinsel-clad angel wailing bad 80s pop songs; the point made by Orlando having a daughter rather than a son eludes me; and not once do we hear the word 'Scrolloping', which in many ways is the sole joy to be had from the novel.
Orlando is a jaunty, playful, mock-biography, a mini tirade about women's rights bound up in a discussion of gender and aesthetics, and a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, bound up a romanticized history of her family. The Gypsy girl Pepita (absent from the film) is an image of Vita's grandmother, and Orlando, as ambassador, is at once Vita, her husband, and her mother. The book takes an offhand, ironic attitude to history and has an outright love of anachronism, and much of this is missing in the movie. The faux biography comes across rather nicely when Swinton talks to camera, but in little beyond that, and I was left rather with a nagging curiosity as to what had been the fucking point of the whole thing. Then again, there is an implicit lesson in the fact that the introduction to my copy spends most of its time talking about Jacob's Room
I'm sorry - that spluttered out pretty poorly, but I'm not sure really of what stands to be said about the film. It could have had an odd, magical feel to it, slowly opening into something more lucid, somewhat harsher, and progressively more at ease with itself, as the book does, but each piece seems to lack something. Most scenes have the feel of a badly posed, or perhaps posed and badly shot, photograph. And while this serves as commentary on the staggeringly poor photographs of the Hogarth edition, it doesn't help the movie very much. I can't help but feel that a treatment more akin to The Hours may have been preferable, or something that played with the biopic/documentary/fiction lines as the novel does with its literary genres.
User Reviews
Submitted by Zoidberg (user info) at 2006-02-14 10:27:34 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Seriously, the ugly bitch sucks at writing fiction, but when she writes *about* writing fiction, it's beyond fascinating.
I think anyone who is serious about writing fiction (or just wants to read a really bitchy series of essays) should read, "A Room of One's Own".
Submitted by Judoka (user info) at 2006-02-13 20:35:47 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
So on the sliding scale of suckiness Orlando is slightly less of an abomination
Submitted by Zoidberg (user info) at 2006-02-13 18:34:26 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
allow me to redress the balance
Submitted by whataefag (user info) at 2006-02-13 18:32:34 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
ahem, I said it was her second worst novel, the qualifier being that they're all pretty fucking awful.
Submitted by Zoidberg (user info) at 2006-02-13 18:00:10 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Wait...
Virginia Woolf has a good novel?
Submitted by The_taste_of_Monkeys (user info) at 2006-02-13 17:08:36 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
it is hard to imagine that Quentin Crisp ever had an actual career beyond just being Quentin Crisp.
yup