Trans activist Paul B Preciado has taken Virginia Woolf’s 1928 gender-fluid classic novel Orlando and made a powerful film essay that combines the life stories of over 20 trans and divergent people with many elements and direct quotes from the novel.
The effect is a stunning cinematic marvel, as the 20 characters assume the role of Orlando but giving their own modern edge to the tale of a young nobleman who while asleep suddenly transitions to be a woman.
Preciado blurs all the distinctions and preconceptions, as well as prejudices we might have about sexual identity and gender- and of course it couldn’t be more topical and controversial if it tried.
Here we get a wonderful array of trans men and women telling of their struggles with society, family, unhelpful psychiatric interventions and the law.
Not being hugely well-versed with the original, it was tricky for me to differentiate Woolf’s words from Preciado’s or those of his cast.
But there are some brilliantly apposite and poignant one-liners in the dialogue. The voice of writer/director says to Virginia, in a letter to the dead writer: “I came out of your fiction,” while another character talks of “the charm of feeling forever alone”.
Orlando, in the original, crosses centuries by sleeping – and sometimes being taken for dead. It’s a powerful image re-enacted on the film set. Psychiatrists get a hard time here with their lack of understanding and sympathy, but being the all-powerful gateway to gender changes and hormone treatment.
There’s even an upbeat and loud musical interlude where the rock singers tell us that the freeing aspect of hormone treatment should be called “pharmacoliberation”.
What the characters bring across to us is their energy, determination to be who they truly believe themselves to be and their refusal to be pigeonholed or marginalised.
Finally Preciado tells us: “the world to come belongs to the new Orlandos”.
Orlando – My Political Biography is in cinemas now.