To its credit, Orlando, My Political Biography barely registers as more than a sociopolitical statement. Indeed, it’s more like a sentence, expanded a thousand times over, than even the word “statement” might imply. Why is such a thing to the movie’s credit? That would be due to the film’s subject matter, in which Virginia Woolf’s eponymous literary figure – born as male in the days of Elizabethan court and continuing as female during her later days as ambassador to Constantinople under King Charles II – comes to be represented by transgender communities within director Paul B. Preciado’s native France. Woolf was always ahead of her time in writing about sex, gender, and the societal roles of both in ways once considered taboo or even degenerate.
We live in comparatively understanding and informed times now, of course, when these conversations and the nomenclature they have inspired are of mainstream concern. There is still pushback, particularly from conservative or dogmatic strands of a country’s populace, and readers in the United States need no reminders of how certain state legislatures have decided to handle the kind of talk that defines this film, which free-wheels between an exploration of fiction and an essay about a generation of people. Preciado himself is a transgender filmmaker, and every interview/audition subject seen onscreen here is either transgender or nonbinary. Therefore, one can feel within the very fabric of the movie’s constitution just how important these ideas are.
It seems somehow shortsighted to refer to the film as a documentary, although it does tell stories of real people through talking-head interviews. It seems shortsighted to suggest that the movie is a work of fiction, although whether these interview subjects are discussing their own experiences or filtering them through an act of theatrical representation is sometimes dizzying to comprehend. It does certainly seem to be asking why, as fiction often wants to do, but even labeling it an essay, when the body of the piece in question is pared down to essential questions, feels inaccurate, too. In other words, it’s hard to fit within a set of expectations, and therefore feels perfectly aligned with how Woolf herself might imagine an exploration of her work to be.
Over the course of the movie, we see interviews with various people, each of whom declares his, her, or themselves to be “the Orlando of Virginia Woolf,” at which point we learn a little bit about them. The little bit might be a personal story about what their sexual or gender identity journey has been like, or it might be a direct address to the audience, as in one such powerful moment, to say that no one else – even those watching this movie, who might be inclined to speak for her – can dictate what one’s own understanding of their gender to be. At other times, we are simply seeing reenactments of monologues in the book, or perhaps monologues entirely original to this movie.
Tying it all together is whispered, pensive narration from Preciado himself, which admittedly limits the profundity of the impact all this has on the audience. Orlando, My Political Biography — so named to mimic what was a rather deceptive subtitle for Woolf’s novel, which was almost certainly not a biography — registers primarily as a fascinating academic piece, fueled by a desire to inform, rather than simply to educate. The film moves with a deliberate pace through these stories and this material, and it’s undeniably a special creation.
Photo courtesy of Sideshow / Janus Films
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