GB, RU, IT, FR, NL 1992, D, SC Sally Potter based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, C Aleksei Rodionov, E Hervé Schneid, M David Motion, Sally Potter, S Kant Pan, P Christopher Sheppard, Adventure Pictures, Cast Tilda Swinton, Billy Zane, Lothaire Bluteau, John Wood, Charlotte Valandrey, Heathcote Williams, Quentin Crisp, Toby Jones, Print colour, DCP from 35mm, 94 min, engl. OV, Adventure Pictures

In the role of handsome squire Orlando, Tilda Swinton starts out by experiencing the decadence of 16th-century Elizabethan court life first-hand. Soon a protégé of the queen, he attempts to build a life upon love, poetry, politics and melancholy, before subsequently shedding his skin and repeatedly morphing into a new person with each new disappointing experience, each time through an invariable seven-day slumber in a process spanning four whole centuries. In the course of one of these fantastic transformations, Orlando becomes a woman. Swinton sizes up her naked image in the mirror with curiosity: “The same person, just another gender,” she states cheekily, and sets off to discover the joy and pain of the other side of the gender divide – namely, female desire and the constricting nature of the role – until she gives birth to a baby girl and brings the experience of the world as a man and a woman into balance as a new person, a defiant “self”. Sally Potter has taken Virginia Woolf’s feminist novel-essay and turned it into an elegantly choreographed work of cinema, one full of wit, poetry and unobtrusively implied depth of meaning. (Günther Bastian, filmdienst.de, 1993)