Description: Orlando (Tilda Swinton), the hero, a beautiful young nobleman who was earlier adored by the aging Queen Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp), goes to sleep one night in the 17th century, only to wake up five days later as the heroine. It's no great shock to Orlando. She turns to the camera (as she does from time to time throughout the film) and says tersely: "Same person, no difference at all. Just a different sex."
Orlando, her curiosity undiminished, goes on learning about life through the centuries up into our own, at which point she is somewhere in her late 30's. In one of her last appearances, the woman (about whom Queen Elizabeth once said, according to Woolf, "I know a man when I see one") is shown helmeted and goggled, driving across the English landscape on a motorcycle, her small daughter bouncing happily in the sidecar. Between the reign of Elizabeth I, when she was a boy, and the 20th century, when motherhood more or less happens to her, Orlando enjoys a serene immortality doing what she chooses. She ponders the differences between men and women and, from her own privileged vantage point, discovers their similarities.
In such ways does Ms. Potter, who wrote the screenplay and directed the film, make the same kind of breathtaking, utterly rational leaps in time and place that Woolf does in prose. She also rediscovers the timelessness and profoundly comic density of the novel that, when it was published in 1928, critics were inclined to describe as "not one of her more serious works."
This was perhaps because "Orlando" was interpreted as being so much influenced by Woolf's love for the flamboyant Vita Sackville-West. Woolf's male-female Orlando was inspired by the aristocratic Sackville-West who, like Orlando, was a writer who worshipped the idea of great literary reputation while finding only fame. Yet the novel can be seen today to far outclass such gossipy and now almost totally irrelevant associations. It's a major work by a first-class literary mind and technician.
This ravishing and witty spectacle invades the mind through eyes that are dazzled without ever being anesthetized. Throughout Ms. Potter's "Orlando," as in Woolf's, there are a piercing kind of common sense and a joy that, because they are so rare these days in any medium, create their own kind of cinematic suspense and delightedly surprised laughter. "Orlando" could well become a classic of a very special kind, not mainstream perhaps, but a model for independent film makers who follow their own irrational muses, sometimes to un-mourned obscurity, occasionally to glory.
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http://rapidshare.com/files/263180304/Orlnd.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/263192343/Orlnd.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/263206492/Orlnd.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/263215378/Orlnd.part4.rar
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