Charlotte Valandrey

Orlando -- Tilda Swinton and Billy Zane star in this Award-winning feature about an English man who defies the laws of nature and comes back to life as an English noblewoman.

Tilda Swinton, Billy Zane and Quentin Crisp star in this "hip, sexy and wickedly funny" film based on the gender-bending novel by Virginia Woolf. Swinton stars as Orlando, an English nobleman who defies the law of nature with surprising results. Immortal and highly imaginative, he undergoes a series of extraordinary transformations which humorously and hauntingly illustrate the eternal war between the sexes. Visually stunning and beautifully acted, ORLANDO is an intoxicating blend of romance, adventure and illusion.

Tilda Swinton, Billy Zane and Quentin Crisp star in this "hip, sexy and wickedly funny" film based on the gender-bending novel by Virginia Woolf. Swinton stars as Orlando, an English nobleman who defies the law of nature with surprising results. Immortal and highly imaginative, he undergoes a series of extraordinary transformations which humorously and hauntingly illustrate the eternal war between the sexes. Visually stunning and beautifully acted, ORLANDO is an intoxicating blend of romance, adventure and illusion.

The great soldier Orlando is lovesick and shows little intention of resuming his former glorious and heroic deeds. When Orlando enters, he is a man clearly torn between his love of fame and his love for Angelica. "Orlando teaches all of us that love is often responsible for our loss of reason," runs a line from Act 3 of the opera. It is a modest moral, and perhaps one not demanding of the dramatic finesse and musical diversity that Handel serves up in Orlando - for the opera's complex of problems is rather more complicated than that. Beneath the fabric of this masterfully woven constellation of characters and values is a score of such independence and vivacity as to give Orlando a special position among Handel's works - indeed among opera literature in general.