Sarah Polley on Sally Potters ORLANDO, TIFF 2022

Sally Potters adaptation of Virginia Woolfs classic novel is the story of a journey through time. Crossing vast tracts of history, Orlando (Tilda Swinton) travels as a young nobleman from the court of Elizabeth I, across the glittering ice of the frozen Thames in 1610, to the deserts of central Asia. There, in the midst of war, he changes sex. As a woman, Orlando returns to the formal salons of 18thcentury London, where she faces a choice: either to marry or to lose everything. In the Victorian age, a time of wildness and repression, she sacrifices both love and inheritance. Finally she emerges into the present as an ordinary individual who in losing everything has gained herself. Potters second feature, this sweeping epic challenges expectations of gender throughout the history of modern Western culture, while exemplifying the directors adeptness at orchestrating setting, gesture, costume, and tableau to produce images which resonate with multilayered significance and intelligence. This is bolst