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Yet already he concludes, before the kaleidoscope of her expressions, before this face that from being all surface, smooth and waxed, passed to an almost fluid state of translucid gaiety, and from the chiselled polish of an opal to the feverish black-red congestion of a cyclamen, that the Name is an example of a barbarous society's primitivism, and as conventionally inadequate as "Homer" or "sea."

What kind of part is Orlando?

Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando in the fall of 1927 and finished it off that next March. It was Vita, she said to her diary, "Orlando: Vita"; others like Vita's husband would say so too. That is to say, for the uninitiated, it was a character spun from her love for her Vita, a male character that suddenly would be transformed into a woman. In many ways this transformation would not be a change. Four centuries would come and go for Orlando, along with flickers of gender oscillation and a general discomfiture with the usual social roles proposed for genders--those of man and wife--no matter Orlando's sex, which is never a matter of things so crude as organs, substances, metaphors, or parts. Orlando's part hinges on it never being touched or spoken, let alone being one. Orlando's part was not a revelation, a sexuality, or a truth. You see, it was immaterial.

Orlando was as close to science fiction or lesbian utopia as Virginia Woolf ever came. It is probably more accurate to call the book an after-dinner fairy tale. For the character remains entirely bound to a romance, which is in part literary conceit and in part roman a clef but always first and foremost Virginia's own. To separate this character from the romance, or, to put it another way, to separate this character from Virginia's love, is to do it/him/her a deep disservice. For this is not a character suited to abstract discussion of gender, not even then, and especially not now.

What then, to say about it/him/her? Well, Orlando is Vita, but Vita transformed. Orlando would begin life as a beautiful Elizabethan aristocratic male, somewhat unlucky in love, prone to maudlin heartache poems, and so fancied by the brittle old queen herself that a great country house is bestowed. Orlando does not return this fancy exactly but does accept the house. Orlando will then lead many lives of maudlin heartache and spend the next four hundred years writing a poem about a tree. One very long and giant romp, you could say, but it happens to be built from the details of Vita's and Virginia's mornings, afternoons, and evenings in the fall of 1927 and the winter of 1928, details that Virginia's nephew would itemize for posterity: "Vita at Knole, showing her over the building--4 acres of it--stalking through it in a Turkish dress surrounded by dogs and children; a cart bringing in wood as carts had done for centuries to feed the great fires of the house; Vita hunting through her writing desk to find a letter from Dryden; Vita sailing through the Mediterranean in January 1926, with gold-laced captains off Trieste; Vita standing gorgeous in emeralds; a description of Vita and Violet Trefusis meeting for the first time upon the ice; Vita dressing her son as a Russian boy and his objection--'Don't,' he said, 'it makes me look like a girl'; Vita courted and caressed by the literary world; the homage of Sir Edmund Gosse, and indeed of Virginia herself. Then, early in September, Maynard and Lydia Keynes gave a party at Tilton. Jack (later Sir John) Sheppard enacted the part of an Italian prima donna, words and music being supplied by a gramophone. Someone had brought a newspaper cutting with them; it reproduced the photograph of a pretty young woman who had become a man, and this for the rest of the evening became Virginia's main topic of conversation."(1)

And so a love passes through the chat and the details to become insubstantial Orlando, a love becomes a romance, a love becomes the decoration of a character: a surface of words. For this is Orlando's tragedy as well as its/his/her charm. This is a character whose consciousness is kept at bay. Virginia sees to it that Orlando is untouched by time, unaffected by history. Clear memory is denied. This is not a tale from which anyone, least of all Virginia Woolf, will wake you. Character is sleep.

Life is not a dream but maybe literature should be. In its day Orlando was very popular, one of Virginia's most popular novels. People found it accessible. Was it because the difficult questions of putting consciousness into a male and then a female body are treated lightly in the novel? When Orlando falls into forgetful sleep periodically, we are given another Gulliver or a Sleeping Beauty that only the author will ever touch. Such a blanketed consciousness may well be simpler, but it is seen through the eyes of a love that cannot bear the thought of change. That kind of love is snarled. But Virginia's love is never questioned in the novel, where, indeed, much is never questioned.

Still, for all the obfuscation, periodically Virginia does scratch the surface of the beyond and there Orlando feels a twinge. At those points Orlando's adolescence comes to a crossing of pain and revelation, that cross of transition that will one day bring hope to bear on death. But not yet to Orlando, oh no, not yet. Orlando is forever Virginia's romance, her Vita, her frozen wild red rose, forever ever after, the last kiss still the first.

To make a film from such a novel and such a character takes one to this crossing where pain is only a distant possibility. Sally Potter's Orlando has gone another way, forswearing even scratching the beyond. It goes for the rose alone. But Sally Potter is unable to render the Vita in Orlando. She has sliced an already refined character very fine, showing less interest in the implications of crossdressing and gender bending than even the novel had displayed. Orlando appears as a thinner, lusher surface, full of awkwardness, art direction, and emptiness. Orlando becomes Tilda Swinton, who siphons her enormous talent into the articulation of this adolescent shell. But can talent make this Orlando more than a character? Could this Orlando be a love?

No. On that score the film flounders. Periodically Tilda Swinton breaks the thinning fiction by turning a quick, iron look to the viewer. But Tilda cannot stand in for Vita, no performance could. This is not a film where sensations bring the beloved or the unseen inside, no, any wind pressing on this character is merely felt as cold. The film chooses not to ask the novel's questions. Instead of interrogating a love, it mouths "What is Cinema?" And if this question no longer satisfies? And if we ask film to step away from the mirror? For that look cannot complicate a character any more than it can give a surface depth. Potter's Orlando ends where it begins: Orlando remains an untroubled surface, plagued by its own unconsciousness and scripted to search for the always already acceptable concept, whether male or female it does not really matter. To put it another way, this Orlando's part reverts to a face. The face, or better, the close-up of the face, is cinema's equivalent of the heartache poem.

We have better ways to think about the face. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" project, for example, proposed the face as a trope for all Western expression, the place where the axes of significance and subjectification cross and words are shot with feeling.(2) To use their face, however, would require breaking the usual bounds of character and cliche. Potter retreats instead into the old, creamy, cinematic face, making it carry desire, making it moon and brood and sigh. And so Tilda Swinton's face does all of these things, beautifully. In so doing it looks unbearably naive and cinematically old.

Virginia's Orlando was a body traveling across time, in the end a paradox, a Vita forever being disembodied by Virginia's words of love. Time's substance, just like love's, is evacuated by the film. Time, like love, is butchered, I wish it were not so, but there is no other way to say it and no excuse for it. Time appears only as a one word intertitle--1650 is POETRY, 1700 is POLITICS, 1850 gets called SEX--history gets to be a teenage abstraction. This is not useful. It is childish. For history is not a new dress or a zeitgeist; dear sisters please be careful here. Perhaps Sally Potter is trying to make fun of the schoolbook, of oversimplifications generally, making fun, even, of Orlando's surface and swing between male and female. But she has reduced not only the plot but also the character so considerably that her Orlando is not even potentially farce. The film leaves Orlando at the end of a time line, female, happy, at one with the angels, an integral Self. If her Orlando could have seen history as a psychic event, character might have had destiny.