Orlando (film, 1992)

Naive and hopeful. Beautiful to look at. The Elizabethan era felt real. The rest of the movie looked and felt like a Terry Gilliam movie (in a positive way: it continued beautiful to look at, but took on an indicative manner: it no longer was the times and places of the narrative, it depicted them, sketched them, and this was the art of it.) The sex scene was only abstractly sexy (I hope that was the intention.) The relationship with the Khan felt powerfully sexual though there was nothing overt and nothing symbolic. The music was acceptable until the finale song, which was embarassing.

The closing voice over tells us Orlando is four hundred years old. She does not seem to have lived those four hundred years, but to have lived through them; she seemd to skip decades at a time. I have not read the book: is that in there, or was that a device of the film? Orlando does not seem to have learned anything in all her long life except to understand why she became female. Her transition was magical: she was not made to look like a man when she was a man but I accepted her as a man. Yet she suddenly looked like a woman when she washed her face after first awakening as a woman. I did not know when to expect the transformation; and it was thrilling. I knew the camera would pull back, though I did not expect the full frontal nudity in the mirror. It was not titillating. It was just a statement. I don’t know how they did that, either.