After 31 years, Sally Potter’s Orlando is re-released, a dreamy, swoony reverie of shapeshifting sexual identity; “gender” isn’t the word used. It is the film that confirmed Tilda Swinton in the arthouse-icon status that Derek Jarman had given her (Hollywood prestige was to come eight years later, in Danny Boyle’s The Beach). The movie concludes with a rapturous closeup on Swinton’s face: sublime, seraphic, enigmatic, while Jimmy Somerville serenades her from heaven, a cheeky falsetto cherub fluttering in the sky.
Potter adapted the 1928 novel by Virginia Woolf, a fantasy adventure inspired by her love affair with Vita Sackville-West; it was also inspired by Woolf’s slightly snobbish reverence for Sackville-West’s centuries-spanning aristocratic genealogy, and by their deliciously exciting patrician-bohemian disregard for bourgeois hetero-normality. With this film, Potter single-handedly upgraded this book from mere jeu d’ésprit, giving it literary canonical status and making it a key text for gender studies. She also established a tradition of casting a female actor rather than a male in the lead in future adaptations – although Emma Corrin, starring in the recent London West End stage revival, is non-binary.
