Orlando (1993)

Orlando (1993)

Starring: Tilda Swinton, Billy Zane, Quentin Crisp, Lothaire Bluteau, John Wood, Charlotte Valandrey, Heathcote Williams

Director: Sally Potter

Screenwriter: Sally Potter

This film was particularly melancholic when researching so a good reference to watch and not mistake sorrow and sadness in a hysterical way but in a more beautiful soft way. Tilda Swinton plays Orlando, a fiercely independent poet, the story starts with queen Elizabeth 1 wonderfully played by Quentin Crisp, who takes a shine to the beautiful boy. The are commical and unusual scenes in the film that show Orlando is immortal, he slips into death like sleeps for long periods of time in which know one can wake him and half way through the 18th Century, changes into a woman. The film is based on a novel by Virginia Woolf and is shot beautifully with grand sets and costumes Orlando is wonderful to look at but remains calm and tranquil in the melancholic style we would like to attempt. Spanning four centuries to the present, Orlando goes through key events in history including the great freeze which saw england encased in ice and snow during the 17th Century. These scenes have a fairy tale magic about them. The story takes you through emotional and locational journeys including the Middle East and a lover of an American Explorer through to child birth and up to the present where we see the actress handing a script to a production company. The director asks Orlando to make the script happier with a positive ending, to which the strong minded writer says no. The closing scenes see her and her daughter return to the original tudor house shot in the first half of the film. There is peaces and quite happiness with melancholic tears of joy and loss. 

This is a beautiful scene in Orlando at a point where she has just refused a marriage proposal as she was not in love, and did not want to be kept. She has been asked but who else will have her being that she was once a man. Distressed she runs into a fast flowing sequence of scenes in which she twists and turns in the maze and as she is just out of sight she changes costume. We thought this was a clever way of changing costumes and the metaphor of the maze and Orlando as a person works well to. The music for this scene has high tempo violins that mimic the pace she is running, this is another element to consider in the process of changing dresses/outfits. The black costume Orlando is wearing is also inspirational for the styling and design aspect of Marko Mitanovski. We are interpreting his style and producing a film to promote it, looking at his original inspiration of tudor dress helps us to create something similar to that of his own on a smaller budget.