Word: woolfe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
That's a lot of sweat for one movie. So why Orlando? "Woolf created a believable, sensual world within an unrealistic story," Potter says. "In a light way, she dealt with some profound themes. Orlando's long life as a man, and then as a woman, lets you appreciate the essential human self that transcends genders. She just blows away the cobwebs of mystique about masculinity and femininity. When I first read the book, as a teenager, I found it such an exuberant liberation from any false notion of femaleness. And Orlando's 400-year life-span...
Just now Potter is ecstatic at her film's success and artfully dodging questions about gender roles in filmmaking. "When I'm working," she says, "I don't feel male or female. After all, what did Virginia Woolf call the mind of the artist? 'The androgynous mind.' " Say, then, that anyone -- man or woman or a new, improved species -- could have made Orlando. But until Sally Potter, nobody did. Nobody dared...
...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...
...sexual orientation and the use of sex as an instrument in many unrelated spheres of activity. Angela Delichatsios' Madeleine explores this reality, in a manner very reminiscent of the cataclysmic sexual role-playing and use of illusion in Edward Albee plays, especially in his Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...