Word: potter
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...raise a tender toast to Orlando: a sensation at film festivals, a hit in Britain, and, once it opens in the U.S. next week, a bracing corrective to the cinema's annual testosterone overdose. Freely and fondly adapting Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel, English filmmaker Sally Potter brings to life a buoyant fantasy world. She imparts a brisk, lush post-modernism to a fable that scans four centuries. But Potter's real triumph is in her pert dressing of an immodest proposal. To be fully human, Orlando says, is to go civilization one better: to be man, then woman, then...
...novel Orlando, inspired by Woolf's love for Vita Sackville-West, is a gay lark disguised as a historical biography. Centuries and genders fly past, each one bending like a willow to accommodate Woolf's puckish feminist insight and hindsight. Potter's movie, faithful in spirit to the book, is something else. It is, in the best sense, a travesty, a masquerade, a cross-dressing comedy of eros. Yet moviegoers do believe in Orlando, in the breadth of its canvas, the immediacy of its emotions, the palliative power of its wit. They can swim in its gorgeous images: the fruit...
Getting it made is another matter; it's not easy to finance a film of one's own when one is a woman. Potter, 43, wrote her Orlando treatment in 1984 but found no takers. "Investors," she says, "often have trouble believing that a woman can handle large sums of money and lead a team, that she has a sufficiently firm hand." So Potter directed for TV: the series Tears, Laughter, Fear and Rage (1986) and a 1988 documentary on Soviet women. Still, she says, "Orlando wouldn't leave me alone. So five years ago, I got my script...
...years of revision. Prince dismisses it as "a glamorous trick." The style he sought, along with Kander, Ebb and librettist Terrence McNally, was the magic realism of Latin American fiction, in which everyday behavior lurches into the weird. If there was a screen influence, Prince says, it was Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, a TV miniseries that hopscotched among layers of reality and expected audiences to get their bearings gradually, by osmosis. Says Prince: "The way the numbers are parsed into Kiss is unique. They are abrupt, fragmented. The scenic design allows you to hallucinate in a fraction...
...hunters and fishermen appeared for the first time along the shores of the Caspian and Aral seas and Lake Baikal. On the Iranian plateau, farmed since at least the 6th millennium B.C., people lived in houses of sun-dried brick, while craftsmen in the city of Anau used the potter's wheel to turn out elaborately shaped and painted clay vessels. These prehistoric Persians carried on trade with small villages in what is now northern Pakistan...