With all due respect to Sally Potter’s visually sumptuous “Orlando,” the seemingly best way to adapt Virginia Woolf is through a side door. Michael Cunningham’s novel “The Hours” works, in part, not because it’s a quasi-adaptation of “Mrs. Dalloway,” but because it stretches out the central issues of that text to see how various women across time deal with the shackles of gender and the patriarchy. Paul B. Preciado’s “Orlando, My Political Biography” takes a similar approach, placing Woolf’s writing in the here and now. Yet, unlike Cunningham’s highbrow pretensions, Preciado’s approach is infinitely more playful and vibrant, hopping across genres in an effort to tease out Woolf’s underlying themes.
As its title suggests, “Orlando, My Political Biography” is a portrait of its director, a trans-man, philosopher, and filmmaker. But it’s also a loose adaptation of the eponymous 1928 novel, a literary critique, and, perhaps most importantly, a portrait of a living, diverse community. While Preciado’s voice is ever-present, he uses it, and Woolf’s novel, as a means to an exploration of trans-identity and the political fights that have existed throughout history for anyone who troubles the gender binary, Woolf included.
Through a series of interviews with trans and nonbinary performers — all who ‘play’ Orlando in the film, ruff and all — Preciado not only presents a collective whole that gives voice to trans oppression but also speaks to the vitality that one must have in the face of a society that too often refuses to accept your personhood. Some of these interviews take the form of direct biography, others as short films, and some even have the subjects reading from Woolf’s novel. In between, the film also provides a compelling history lesson, juxtaposing Woolf against Christine Jorgensen, one of the most well-known trans activists in the mid-twentieth century. The approach feels like a collage, as lo-fi sets and costumes are placed on and around the performers in real-time. In doing so, Preciado calls attention to both the performativity of Woolf’s writing and the gaps in “Orlando.”
He’s also willing to critique Woolf, openly questioning the writer’s decision to make Orlando an aristocrat and never fully addressing the gender switch at the heart of her novel. As he notes, it’s never as easy as one day waking up a man, as Orlando does. Instead, one has to learn to navigate a medical field antagonistic to your livelihood, something that is visualized in the film in almost Kafkaesque terms.
Yet, the film is also so quick to include more subjects, sets, and vignettes that it sometimes stretches beyond the limits of its runtime. It sometimes would’ve been nice to spend more time unpacking Woolf’s own biographical connections and the reasons why she wrote “Orlando.” Further, by including 20 other ‘Orlando” performers, sometimes the film moves too quickly between them.
Nevertheless, it’s refreshing for a film to be stuffed with too many ideas and not enough. It would be understandable if “Orlando, My Political Biography” fell into nihilism, considering the recent attacks on trans rights. Still, Preciado instead creates a fully alive film, reveling in its multi-genre approach. It’s a film that not only works as a self-reflective biography and community portrait but also as a testament to the living nature of literature, where a work is able to be interpreted and reinterpreted by the generations to come. By reflecting on Woolf’s prescience, Preciado has created a result of his own that will stand the test of time. [A-]
