With her assured and insouciant Orlando, however, Sally Potter breaks the mold. But if Potter has managed to assemble and direct a British-Russian-French-Dutch-Italian coproduction that telescopes nearly four centuries of British history and seems quintessentially British, it may be because the identity that her film explores is only secondarily national. Orlando freely adapts the 1928 Virginia Woolf novel whose eponymous protagonist, enjoined by the aged Queen Elizabeth I to "not fade, not wither, [and] not grow old," lives 400 years, only changing mid-narrative from male to female.

A costume drama with the emphasis on costume, particularly as it informs the construction of gender identity, Potter's Orlando is an extravagant caprice grounded in assured camera moves and bravura performances-- mainly that of Tilda Swinton, who not only plays Orlando but appears in virtually every frame. The 33-year-old Swinton-- a performer who radiates intelligence-- was memorable as the grave female android in Peter Wollen's Friendship's Death and, as Derek Jarman's favorite actress, has graced his Caravaggio, The Last of England, and Edward II. She's barely known here-- something Orlando is bound to change.

Thanks in part to Swinton, Potter seems to have opened up a space between England's two reigning experimentalists, Jarman and Peter Greenaway. Orlando's production was designed by the latter's Dutch collaborators, Ben van Os and Jan Roelfs, and it offers a series of droll and spectacular set pieces, such as the arrival of Queen Elizabeth's torchlit barge and the series of official receptions held on the frozen Thames during the great frost of 1610 (complete with waiters on ice skates). Much of Orlando was shot in the former Soviet Union, with St. Petersburg standing in for wintry London and Uzbekistan providing a suitably exotic location for Orlando's stint as an ambassador.

As witty as Orlando's settings are, its literary references are more so-- ranging from the early production of Othello (with Desdemona, naturally, played by a man), deemed by Orlando as a "terrific play," to, a century later, the by-now regendered protagonist's altogether less enjoyable encounter with the caustic swinery of the writers Swift, Addison, and Pope. In between, Orlando patronizes and is patronized by a bad-tempered poet with teeth to match, played to maximum comic effect by playwright Heathcote Williams.

It is a lack of enthusiasm for war that precipitates Orlando's sex change. He goes to sleep and wakes up a woman. "Same person...just a different sex," she tells us. Still, back in England, the lady Orlando is corseted in a dress large enough to occupy an entire divan, forced to maneuver sideways past the hedges in the manicured garden. Worse, she loses her rights-- including the right to be taken seriously-- and is compelled to suffer all manner of propositions. Her reward: a romantic interlude with a dashing American revolutionary played by Billy Zane. (In the film's libidinal economy, this is the least perverse of Orlando's dalliances: while still "male," Orlando is smitten with and jilted by the flirtatious daughter of the Russian ambassador and later enjoys a tipsy, fraternal encounter with a Central Asian potentate, drinking to "brotherly love" and the "manly virtues.")

Although picked to open New York's prestigious New Directors/New Films series, Orlando is neither Potter's first, nor even her first successfully revisionist, film. Thriller (1979), one of the most commercial Anglo-American avant-garde films of the high theoretical early '80s, recast Puccini's La Boheme as a brooding murder mystery whose victim is the "doomed" seamstress Mimi. In the opera, Mimi is the mistress of the poet Rodolfo and her consumptive death throes provide Puccini with the stuff of a fourth-act finale; in Potter's 35-minute feminist deconstruction, Mimi ponders her demise in a Sunset Boulevard-style posthumous narration.

Orlando, too, has a present-day ending, if a somewhat more upbeat feminist perspective. "The spirit of this century has finally taken me and broken me," Orlando cries as she runs, pregnant, across the muddy battlefields of the world wars. Unlike Woolf's protagonist, however, Potter's lives into the present day of rock arias and camcorders-- long enough to give birth to a daughter, a manuscript, and, by implication, a movie.

Orlando has been released in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Classics. Thriller is available from Women Make Movies (462 Broadway, Suite 501, New York, New York 10013).