Orlando 4K 1992 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

XVII century London. Orlando is a young aristocrat, hermaphrodite in the fashion of the time and serious about turning a life he knows so little about into an art he knows even less about.

Orlando attracts the attention of the aging Queen Elizabeth I, and her majesty orders him not to grow up and not to grow old. Orlando obeys, inexplicably remaining rosy-cheeked and handsome even as the centuries pass.

Review 4K Movie

Englishwoman Sally Potter, making her directorial debut, has ventured into one of Virginia Woolf's key works, the novel of the same name, written in 1928. It is a phantasmagorical biography of an ephemeral hero named Orlando, born a man, who later became a woman and lived for more than three centuries...

The book, called in its day by Nigel Nicholson (son of Wolfe's friend and cohabitant) "the longest and most charming love letter in the history of literature," initially presented no small challenge for adaptation. Wolfe's groundbreaking writing has always been considered difficult to translate into film. It is no coincidence that none of the references to her novels became an achievement of screen art, since they initially involved radical experimentation with the form and ways of adequately presenting the issues and themes that troubled Wolfe.

Her views were shaped in her younger years by the philosopher George Edward Moore, who espoused the theory that love, friendship, and mutual attraction were above social conventions. Becoming one of the leaders of the literary movement of modern fiction, in "Orlando" Wolfe focused her interests on the representation of the inner world of the characters, on ways to overcome the mundane and all sorts of transformations of consciousness.

But all these difficulties did not stop Potter, who ventured to fit the voluminous novel into an hour and a half of screen time. The film consists of seven parts - death, love, poetry, politics, society, sex, birth - and covers, following the source material, a giant time period - from the 1600s to the beginning of the twentieth century. Orlando, first a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, then an ambassador to an Oriental country, and finally a rocker girl who travels the world with her daughter, walks through this space of history, changing genders.

The sophistication of the visuals, to which our cameraman Alexei Rodionov and Dutch artists Ben van Os and Jan Rufels had a hand, almost openly inherits the artistic principles of Peter Greenaway (only with less audacity), adapting the radical reformist director's innovations to the demands of a wider audience.

The film exists in the blurred boundaries between marginal and mainstream cinema, defined by the absence of a clearly constructed linear plot. For example, another time jump forward a hundred years between chapters five and six does not logically connect the neighboring parts, nor does it intelligibly explain the reason for Orlando's sex change.

Potter, following Wolfe, dared to go beyond the sexual predetermination of love relationships, which prescribes a connection only with the opposite sex, and tried to find new sensations in love with her own kind. Although the film only signifies the questions that plagued Wolfe and in some ways copies her formal innovations, it still manages to convey the stirring passion and strangeness of a novel in which the main character was obsessed with the search for true love and not satisfied with one life and one sexuality.