make me a man: Orlando

Tilda Swinton (Female Perversions, 1996)

Tilda Swinton as Orlando - sixteenth-century male

Tilda Swinton as Orlando - seventeenth-century male

Tilda Swinton as Orlando - eighteenth-century female

Tilda Swinton as Orlando - modern female

In this movie based on the Virginia Woolf novel, Orlando (Tilda Swinton), a young Elizabethan courtier, is commanded by Queen Elizabeth I to stay forever young. So begins a four-century odyssey as Orlando ‘drifts dreamily and bemused from one era to the next’ – although he changes sex in disgust at the behavior of men to end up as a modern day single-mother.

A colourful succession of tableaux without content – reminiscent of a Peter Greenaway movie: but then Virginia Woolf novels leave me cold too. The movie did however contain an interesting cameo from Quentin Crisp (the original Naked Civil Servant) as Queen Elizabeth I.

Morag Ross was the makeup supervisor; Jan Archibald was the hair styles supervisor.