movie review: orlando, a political biography
La vie ne ressemble pas du tout à une biographie. Elle consiste à une métamorphose de soi, se laisser transformer par le temps: devenir pas seulement un autre, mais d'autres.
[Life looks nothing like a biography. It consists of a metomorphosis of the self, letting yourself transform by time: to become not just an other, but others.]
About a month ago, I looked on my list of movies to watch and noticed "Orlando, My Political Biography" listed. I couldn't remember what it was1, so I searched and found out it was a movie interpretation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando guided by trans experiences.
After some searching, I found that it will be playing at a movie theater in my city. Lucky! I got two trans friends to join me as well as my girlfriend.
review
The source material, "Orlando: A Biography" by Virginia Woolf, tells the story of an aristocrat who changes sex halfway, then lives for centuries to see the world change.
The movie starts out with a guy rolling posters of this movie on the street. He says "fucking Virginia Woolf" wrote his biography in 1928. He thanks her for being ahead of her time, but is also upset she made the hero a colonialist aristocrat. From the beginning, the movie dives into the paradox of Orlando: a trans aristocrat.
To unpack the paradox, the movie interleaves various honest reflections on trans experiences with the narrative of the original book. Orlando is played by a series of trans actors. Each one sits in costume and talks about their experience both as themselves and as Orlando. The beauty of the movie is that it's often hard to tell which is which. One actor would talk about his family accepting him in his transition and then about moving to Constantinople as an ambassador. There is room for a bit of fiction within their life and a bit of reality within the adaptation. The actors are even shown putting on costumes and microphones as they take on the Orlando persona. At times it feels we are watching the "behind the scenes" reel, yet this is the main movie.
We see various Orlandos fight to receive a "gender dysphoria" diagnosis at a psychiatrist to receive hormones, find beauty in admiring someone without knowing their gender, connect with others in history, deal with the twisted expectations of existing within a patriarchal society, and struggle with ids.
Despite the subject matter, the movie never really takes itself seriously. It manages to make the trans struggles portrayed feel very real, but also pokes fun at the gendered society which makes them happen.
overall impressions
Going in, I was hesitant about the experimental nature of it but found myself drawn in within 10 minutes. It was a completely enthralling experience.
I was really inspired by the quote at the very top: to let time make you not just an other, but others. In the past couple months, I've been trying to figure out what kind of person I want to be. Now I wonder if perhaps I should let time shape me into multiple kinds of people instead of just one. We continue to change, so why should our goals be fixed?
In seeing the movie blend reality and fiction, I felt that my life acquired a fictional quality as well. I have tried a few times to write up some particularly memorable days on this blog, but could not get the story together. Some details would be lost, and other details would reveal too much about my friends. After watching Orlando, I realized I could sprinkle some fiction to spice up the retelling and to conceal otherwise overwhelming flavors.
I'm not sure how I heard about Orlando, but considering it's a French trans movie, it's likely from this podcast.↩