Movie - Proving that the BFI is not just for the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, but for life (I was doing a xmas/puppies thing) the Southbank paid tribute to one of the best female British Directors, Sally Potter, with a retrospective season. The jewel in the Elizabethan crown is this digitally remastered version of queer classic Orlando.


Based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, Tilda Swinton plays a young courtier to Elizabeth I, gloriously portrayed by Quentin Crisp. The Queen bequeaths a large estate to Orlando, as long as he promised never to age or fade away. True to his word, Orlando lives for a hundred or years or more, finding and losing love, until one day he wakes up a changed woman.

"Same person, different gender," muses a newly female Orlando as she dons a cumbersome dress. It is this humorous approach to gender as drag which separates this 1992 film from the aggression of its new queer contemporaries. Swinton makes frequent bemused expressions to the camera, making the audience an accomplice in this poetic rambling through one man/woman's immortality.

Orlando trailer:



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The BFI organised on wonderful (and lengthy) Q&A with Potter and Swinton, who quickly fell to joking and gossiping like old friends, despite occasional segues into gender philosophy.

"It remains true to this day that we don't really understand what gender is," says Potter. "How we determine biologically how our hormones or physical selves create us as male or female, and how much is what we've learned, because there is no neutral abstract setting where people grow up without one or the other. But what is certain is that men and women have far more in common as human beings than they have differences."

Swinton looked amazing in a short dress and killer heels, with slicked hair. She has always managed to use androgyny to her advantage, from the early days of Derek Jarman films, to mainstream America playing a genderless Angel Gabriel in Constantine. That is why Potter never considered anyone else for the role, and worked closely with Swinton over many years to create exactly the film they wanted. They bemoan that it is much harder to get films made now that nobody is willing to take a risk on something so independent, devoid of traditional plot, and full of questions with no answers.

Singer Patrick Wolf was in the audience and asked Potter about the soundtrack, saying that it had been a huge influence on him. She explained that out of necessity, she had composed it herself. It's a sweeping mix of Purcell inspired classical music, mixed with a modern approach and falsetto from Jimmy Sommerville (who makes a wonderfully surreal cameo as an angel, suspended on a wire over a London park.)

The movie brings Orlando right up to the present day, as Woolf did, only that means different time periods. So we finish in a barely recognisable Canary Wharf, as Orlando is pitching the manuscript of her life to a publisher. I realised how far the world had come in only 17 years, but at the same time felt that the issues in Orlando, were as immortal as the eponymous character.