Today this movie was screened in my film class and I thought it was the weirdest movie I had ever seen. Made no sense, creeped me out. Why did she turn into a man? Was she actually woman the whole time? Why the heck didn't she age, because a dude playing the Queen told her so?! Why did everyone just accept her sex change? Someone explain to me how this can be a good movie. Yes, I am a woman so don't pull the femenist thing on me.
shareShe turns into a woman from a man.
It is full of many depths and thought provoking ideas. Open your mind up to them.
Chris Thorpe
The lore of the mind counts further than the words of the mouth.
ehm, because sex change should be accepted.....you seem like a transophobe her, i can smell it
shareBizarre, indeed. Ambitious, certainly. Successful, perhaps.
I just saw this film on Turner Classic Movies -- of all places.
I think the biggest failure of Ms. Potter's film is that she doesn't establish the tone of the film until about 30 minutes in. That tone -- in case you didn't get it -- is that of farce, irony, satire. The Tilda Swinton character might as well have been winking at the camera (which is what all that breaking of the 4th wall is about).
Once I got this, I found the film quite entertaining. I had no clue what was coming next. I even caught myself laughing.
But I thought the 'point' of the film -- i.e. to comment on the unfair societal handcuffs placed on women and advantages given unflinchingly and arbitrarily to even the most feminine of men -- could have been more gracefully and accessibly delivered to the audience.
Still, a visually captivating film. And a wonderful experiment. Worth a watch.
(I should note that I haven't read the Virginia Woolf piece, but I'm an ardent believer that any film adaptation should stand on its own two legs -- even to dumb American audience members like myself.)
I'm 100% with the original poster on this. I had to see it in my film class. It was honestly a mistake taking this class. Most of the people on this message board sound like my classmates. A bunch of smug people majoring in pointless subjects(Arabic Studies here). Really get a grip, people. The first person to reply was just arrogant saying if she was a film major she would go crazy with Fellini. The only work of Fellini that made me go crazy was Ginger and Fred because it was basically the Italian adaptation of Pee Wee's Big Adventure. As Americans, I think we just overanalyze stuff and call it art. The first film of Potter's I saw in this class was Thriller and that was horrid. This movie is better, but get real people. You're not intellectual just because you can analyze a movie. You're just smug and arrogant and probably not even right at all. And for the record, my ideal movies have high body counts, explosions, little to no romance and a plethora of cheesy one-liners.
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share“Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.”
--Madeleine L'Engle
"Oh, you should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.
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Nilbog! It's goblin spelled backwards! This is their kingdom!
"The secret isn't that you're not being told. The secret is that you're not able to hear." --Ram Dass
Nilbog! It's goblin spelled backwards! This is their kingdom!
You know why films - and art in general - are so different? It's because people are different and tastes are different. People take in different information in different ways. Congratulations to everyone who is so smug about the fact that this film spoke to them, but if someone is confused about a film, how about explaining to them how you interpreted the film instead of boasting about how amazing you are and putting down everyone who doesn't think exactly the same as you, without even hinting at a potential answer. Ffs, that's why people come on these forums and ask questions because they want to hear what YOU have to say about it.
Aristotle versus Mashy Spike Plate!
I don't think anyone was being smug, but surely, the posters who didn't "get" the film were being snarky, and proclaiming it a mess and complete waste of time. They were not saying, "I don't get this film, can you explain it?" And the people defending the film to the rude commenters were just responding in a similar vein.
One search on YouTube would have allowed the confused to hear what the director says about the film, but my guess is they're actually uninterested in hearing it, already having decided they're right and the wealth of people who have seen many great films and even study film for a living and understand the director's vision, have their heads up their asses. What can you do?
You can dislike whatever films you want to, but just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's crap.
And, to provide an answer:
From a critic:
[Director Sally] Potter argued that the more pragmatic medium of cinema called for reasons to drive the narrative, over the novel's abstraction and arbitrariness, especially as the story itself is based on a kind of suspension of disbelief. Thus, it is Queen Elizabeth who bestows the long life upon Orlando. The change of sex is a result of Orlando reaching a crisis of masculine identity when he is unwilling to conform to what is expected of him as a man. Nor as a woman can Orlando conform."
From the filmmaker, Sally Potter:
"Each person’s emancipation is through themselves, and the story of Orlando is of someone who is both a man and woman, and it’s the story of the liberation of man from the constraints of masculinity, as much as it’s the story of the liberation of a woman from the restraints of femininity, and what it says is that both of those identities are a trap and a prison, and inside the prison is a human being, and that both men and women share that common human essence with each other even more closely than they have differences."
She asks how this can this be a good movie??? Why on earth was the original poster taking a film class in the first place?
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