CINEMA: Stanley Peskin
THERE is little reason to doubt that Orlando (the pan- historical figure who serves Queen Elizabeth, changes sex in Constantinople and takes more than 300 years to write a poem) represents Virginia Woolf’s friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, who, in Woolf’s words, inspired “the lusts of the flesh and the lure of the mind”.
Although the film Orlando is often, like the book, giddy with a sense of “time in the mind” that Woolf could never account for, it misses the effusiveness and effervescence of the novel. Written and directed by Sally Potter, it telescopes Woolf’s pseudo-biographical romp into a series of pageant-like sequences that are too diagrammatic and spare in their treatment of gender politics, sex and love.
The use of Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth, a role which surely must have gratified his own aspirations, allows Potter to emphasise not only the androgynous nature of the eponymous hero/heroine, but the notion that the sexes intermix (amusingly indicated by the presence of several castrati singers in the film). Both the queen and Orlando (Tilda Swinton) are red-haired, one near dying, the other in the bloom of youth. Crisp, whose very appearance makes one aware of the skeleton that lies beneath the flesh, is intensely moving as he/she enjoins Orlando neither to fade, nor wither, nor grow old. En travesti, Swinton possesses grace and she is a skilful actress, but she is never completely convincing as a young man and she lacks the glamour with which Woolf endows her protean creation.
Potter echoes Woolf’s concern with gender. When Orlando awakens as a woman, she sees her image in the mirror and reflects: “Same person, no different at all — just a different sex.” But back in England, she is corsetted and constrained as she walks through her ancestral home where both she and her furniture are covered in white.
There’s a particularly biting scene in which Pope, Addison and Swift dismiss women as “creatures who have no desires, only affectations”. Elsewhere, England’s habit of collecting countries is associated with men’s treatment of women as property.
Orlando’s Victorian lover, Shelmerdine (Billy Zane), is essentially a Romantic figure at heart. Although he quotes Shelley extensively in the book, he is more positively Byronic in the film. A free spirit, he is off to America in pursuit of a liberty that is denied to Orlando until she finds herself in the 20th century, a single mother and the author of a book.
Although there are several discussions of literary genius in the film, the self-referring nature of the book and Woolf’s own passionate immersion in literature and the difficulty of composition are quite properly omitted as uncinematic.
The film as a whole lacks narrative pace and dramatic conviction, but there are some remarkable images: the sensuous surfaces of the candlelit Elizabethan court; Orlando skating with the Muskovite Sasha in the snow; Orlando’s female self pupating in a Byzantine setting; horses and a train in a single frame that tell us that the Industrial Revolution is in full swing; a pure white Orlando and a tawny Shelmerdine entwined in each other’s arms, among many others. The beauty of Alexei Rodionov’s cinematography is assisted by Ben van Os’ superb production design.
Neil Jordan’s film version of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (opening December 30), scripted by the novelist herself, places Jordan in familiar territory as he explores the problems of power and sexual identity.
There are reminders of earlier films. In the treatment of Claudia, a 10-year-old vampire, and her union with the grown-up Madelaine, there are traces of Company of Wolves (1984) and Mona Lisa (1986). The relationships between Louis and Lestat (who confesses to liking both fresh young women and gilded youths), and then between Louis and Armand, clearly have homoerotic undertones. Moreover, the vampire material permits Jordan to access those unconscious and predatory instincts which were so central to The Crying Game (1992).
As in Rice’s novel, Louis (Brad Pitt) tells the story of his life to a young reporter (Christian Slater). “Shall we begin, like David Copperfield?” he asks, and indeed there is some resemblance to the correct young man of Dickens’ novel. Although he has chosen to be a vampire, the burden of blood and immortality weighs heavily upon him. Louis’ feeling of alienation and his conviction that love cannot exist in a state of evil also ally him with Hamlet. His disposition is certainly antic, as unlike Lestat, his maker, he refuses to shake off his “mortal coil”, and his dilemma is “to be or not to be”. I am not at all sure how seriously Rice intends us to take these literary references, but they are in the film.
I am also uncertain about Rice’s response to Christian mythology. Although she makes use of the Edenic story, the fall from grace and the loss of innocence, there is little in the film to suggest that she believes in free will and the recovery of grace. Inevitably, the use of vampire lore is anti-Christ, but when Rice allows Lestat to say “God kills indiscriminately and so shall we”, and Armand (Antonio Banderas, splendid in red and black) to state that he knows nothing of God and the Devil, there is little to suggest that she does not share their iconoclastic beliefs.
Rice is equally heretical when it comes to vampire mythology. All the business with crucifixes, stakes through the heart and garlic is dismissed as the ravings of a demented Irishman. Her vampires are cultivated creatures: they know the Italian terms for music and they quote Shakepeare. She has, too, scanty regard for the family as the prop of social harmony: the family relationship between Louis, Lestat and Claudia is sexually ambiguous and dysfunctional. When a beringed and beribboned Claudia kills a piano teacher and a doll-maker who displease her, she bears some resemblance to a spoilt and wilful Shirley Temple; she is told “not to kill in the house”.
Jordan chooses to excise the relationship between Louis and Armand which dominates the last section of the book. The muted sadness of this extended passage is jettisoned for a more wildly gleeful ending.
There is a delicious scene in which Louis, who has returned to America, discovers the “mechanical wonder” of cinema and gluts himself on images of sunrise in Murnau’s Nosferatu, Gone with the Wind and Tequila Sunrise. The cinematography by Phillipe Rousselot and the production design by Dante Ferretti (his first name is so inappopriate) are equally delectable. Jordan indulges in elegant tracking shots which are a constant source of pleasure and excitement. A vein pulsating in a neck becomes an object of desire; blood is everywhere and it sticks.
The film begins and ends in San Francisco in 1988, with a requiem on the soundtrack. In 1976, when the book was published, Aids had not yet come into identifiable existence and a cautionary note may be struck here. Interview with the Vampire, which ostensibly enjoins us to kiss with those red lips and look with those vampire eyes, should not, I think, be too readily dismissed as delirious nonsense.