Critically reflecting on Potter’s Orlando, the film is remarkable for its feminist and postmodernist implications and the ability of the director to reflect on Woolf’s style and approach during the whole plot development. Although Woolf’s Orlando was completed in 1928, Potter managed to connect the book events with contemporary reality and did so in perfect union with the great writer’s vision. She captured the language, the tone, the mood, the humor, the sentiments, and even the narrator’s subconscious flow of thought that the writer incorporated into the book.
An interesting point in the film is the transformation of the main protagonist who not only changes his sex but also develops an entirely new world vision with the new values, pursuits, and ambitions when the person becomes a woman. Moreover, upon giving birth to a child, the heroine experiences further redevelopment of her mentality. She becomes more resolute and a self-sufficient individual and finally finds herself independent. Thus, the audience marvels at the incredible metamorphosis occurring during the progress of the film plot.
Another notorious idea in the film is the fact that the main character finds an opportunity to realize one’s inner potential in order to find true life satisfaction only when the person changes sex and becomes a woman. This concept is thought-provoking since it opposes the commonly-spread notion that a person may realize one’s ambitions to the fullest extent only in case one is of a male identity that is to say only men dominate in today’s world. This film concept is highly feminist and it encourages the revolution of modern stereotypes and dogmas.
The film under consideration finds numerous reflections in the offered class readings. Particularly, the theme of feminism is both the central idea in Orlando and the given class readings. All of them observe the matters related to women’s struggle for their rights along with the postmodernist implications such as gender ambiguousness, signification of gender, collapse of the paternal function of individualism, and challenge of stereotypic gender constructions (Humm, 1997; Pidduck, 1997). For instance, in their article, Ferris and Waites (2003) have stated that “in Potter’s film, such Brechtian (or modernist) techniques become postmodern in that they regularly expose the confusion of gender identity and the problematic of sex” (p. 109).
Further, the film and the offered readings help to capture the image of manhood and womanhood created in the works of literature and art. While the movie depicts the main protagonist as the person with the shifting identity, the articles from the class reading clearly represent the concepts of masculinity and femininity. In this vein, the article “Manly Men” by Suman (n. d.) describes the image of a true man with its brutality, hardness, and the bare faceted ferocity. In the article “Unclosing Gender: The Postmodern Sensibility in Sally Potter’s Orlando” by Ferris and Waites (2003), the readers may find a detailed picture of femininity. In contrast, Orlando creates an image of a shifted identity to attract the viewers’ attention to the problems of gender division gender role distribution. To explain, the main protagonist appears to be an unusual man with a row of personal qualities peculiar for women when one is a man in the first episode of the film, and still, when the person becomes a woman, one continues to have character traits that are proper to men.
References
Ferris, S., & Waites, K. (2003). Unclosing gender: The postmodern sensibility in Sally Potter’s Orlando. Class Reading, 110-114.
Humm, M. (1997). Feminism and film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Pidduck, J. (1997). Travels with Sally Potter’s Orlando. Class Reading, 172-189.
Suman, D. (n. d.). Manly men. Class Reading, 1.