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On the big
screen again in New York and LA, Sally Potter’s now classic
Orlando
(based on the
novel
by Virginia Woolf) in a digitally re-mastered
version. The opulent, intelligent, sweeping film stars a
younger Tilda Swinton (who is also being talked about at the moment
for her turn in the equally sumptuous
I Am Love). We say read the
book, or see the movie, and better yet, do both!
Tilda
Swinton as Orlando
“The taste
for books was an early one. As a child he [Orlando] was sometimes
found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper
away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the
glow-worms away, and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.
To put it in a nutshell, leaving the novelist to smooth out the
crumpled silk and all its implications, he was a nobleman
afflicted with a love of literature.”
The
original film poster, 1993
Virginia
Woolf, in her 1928 novel
Orlando,
A Biography, created strange
alchemy from fact, fantasy, and history. We follow aristocratic
Orlando (who is blessed with eternal youth!) through almost 400 years - beginning in the reign of
Elizabeth I. Orlando leads a life of adventure and passion, always in
love with books, but also falling in love with the daughter of the
Russian Ambassador, and later, going native when sent to the
Turkish court in Constantinople as Ambassador himself under King
Charles. And halfway through the journey to the 20th century
wakes up to find that he has been transformed into a woman. As
Lady Orlando he continues his fantastic adventures, befriending
famous English writers. There are the limitations imposed by
the new gender, but as a woman, Orlando finds true love with Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine.
“Towering dark
against the yellow-slashed sky of dawn, with the plovers rising
and falling about him, she saw a man on horseback...”
The whimsical
prose is musical but always precise, it drifts and dances, always
to the tune of an original and fantastic imagination. A
mischievous imagination, for it is Woolf’s most playful work. Conrad Aiken writing in 1929 in the
Chicago Dial said,
'...she
[Woolf] is pulling legs, keeping her tongue in her cheek, and
winking, now and then, a quite shameless and enormous wink.'
And Arnold
Bennett, writing soon after the book's publication, called it
‘A
play of fancy, a wild fantasia, a romance, a high-brow lark.’
(He meant this to be a
detraction, alluding to its artifice, its subtle snobbery, but
we think, since he makes the detraction sound so tempting,
so like praise, that perhaps, he was, in his own fashion,
winking....?)
See:
Orlando, now
playing in NYC
See it on
DVD:
Orlando
Read:
Orlando
Tags:
literature
film
books
england
language
love
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