Fair-skinned with crimson hair, British filmmaker Sally Potter rather resembles the title character of her new movie, Orlando. A serene intelligence keeps them both in the quiet center of storms of their own creation. Orlando, a young nobleman serving as the British ambassador to Constantinople in the 1700s, goes to bed one fateful night and wakes up a woman. He/she lives for four hundred years and is, at the close of the movie, still just thirty-six years old. Potter, heretofore known only to a few as an avant-garde jack-of-all-arts, laboriously raised $4 million, a Hollywood pittance, to adapt Virginia Woolf's highly literary and fanciful novel Orlando to the screen. She shot it in England and in St. Petersburg in the grip of midwinter and in Uzbekistan in full desert heat, and came away with a droll and magisterial fable about men and women that has become a film-festival hit and is now beginning its much-heralded commercial run. Let history judge whose is the unlikelier tale.
In the movie, Potter first subverts our sense of the world with an Elizabethan England where life and death and courtly rituals seem real enough but gender is always something of a wild card. The lad Orlando (wonderfully underacted by Tilda Swinton) is a court favorite of Queen Elizabeth (likewise by Quentin Crisp) who has an eye for a well-turned male calf. Here we have the tableaux of a woman playing a man who will turn into a woman being fondled by an old queen being played by an old queen. Rich, you say, but then the English have always gone in for gender bending, whether of the old-fashioned music-hall variety (Benny Hill in a tutu) or something more with-it (the Kinks song "Lola"). Potter's achievement is to make the perverse normal, or as Orlando puts it as she inspects her new female body in the mirror, person, different sex." It is the film's idealistic yearning for a pure self, free from society's gender codes, that has touched a chord in unexpected places. "I've had middle-aged men come up to me in tears," Potter says.
First among the liberated is the filmmaker herself. She has used all of her talents to bring Orlando to life - composer, choreographer, writer, director. Indeed, Potter at forty-three, like Orlando at four hundred, might seem to have done everything worth doing, with the possible exception of having a child. (Orlando meets a dashing American sailor in the nineteenth century and fills in that blank.) Says Potter with a shrug, "Throughout history, millions of women have had children, but not too many have made feature films."