Orlando, My Political Biography review

Tricksy documentary spin on 1928 novel weaves fact and fiction to reconsider and reimagine the time-travelling story for our time

Paul B Preciado’s documentary is a jeu d’ésprit; maybe in fact a jeu d’ésprit about a jeu d’ésprit. It is a meditation on Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography – which has previously been adapted for stage and screen many times, most famously by Sally Potter in the 1992 film starring Tilda Swinton – about an Elizabethan aristocrat who changes sex from man to woman and magically lives on youthfully into the modern age, an anti-Faustian miracle of survival.

In this film, Preciado stages various scenes in which trans people present their own engaged critique: re-enacting moments from the book, or from their own lives and memories, or their own thoughts about Woolf, sometimes playfully mashing up details of Orlando’s life with their own – and wondering how it would look if Woolf’s creation was forced to endure psychiatric intervention the way they did. The film might occasionally feel a bit self-conscious, but in a way this is a by-product of the film’s experimental nature; trans people are engaging with this fictional literary text in which trans identity has a poetic reality, a visionary reality, precisely that reality which is here found to be empowering.