ORLANDO: MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY — Fruitcake Enterprises

Directing: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Within the first few minutes of Orlando: My Political Biography, one of the young people sitting in the row behind my said, “This movie is so French.” Indeed,

The person who said it seemed mildly amused, not particularly irritated. I’ll say that this film reached me a bit more successfully as it went on, but also that it regularly lost me, then pulled me back in, then lost me again, then pulled me back in again. Some of this was, perhaps, indeed its very French-ness. I suspect some of it was that I was almost certainly the oldest person in that audience, a gender-nonconforming elder receiving an interpretive lesson on how today’s trans and nonbinary youth approach gender identity.

To call Orlando: My Political Biography “high concept” would be an understatement. Writer-director Paul B. Preciado, who is himself 53 years old (and, importantly, a trans man) assembled 26 trans and nonbinary people to introduce themselves by name on camera, declare that they are “playing Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” and wear a ruffled collar while doing so. This is all a riff on Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography, which might work better should you have read the novel recently, or at all. I have never read it, but the film makes many references to how the novel’s namesake protagonist famously suddenly switches genders midway through the story. It does not, however, make any reference to Tilda Swinton playing the role in a 1992 film adaptation.

It should be noted that the 26 subjects featured in the film range from 8 to 70 years old, which would suggest a broad range of ages, but there are only a group of three kids, and one 70-year-old. There’s a couple of clearly middle-aged people, but the majority of them are clearly young, ranging from their teens to their twenties. But there is intention to this as well: the subjects on the edges of this spectrum serve as both contrasts and anchors for the others, who become a collective portrait of contemporary trans and nonbinary experience, of a kind of defiant joy, in the face of persistent societal pressures.

In a sort of parallel to blurring gender lines, Preciado blurs the line between subject and performer, having his subjects recite lines—sometimes directly from the novel; sometimes other written material—as well as having his subjects simply share their thoughts and experiences. The early scenes are perhaps the most avant-garde, which unfortunately makes them the least inviting. At one point, a subject essentially makes out with the trunk of a tree.

This film is garnering rave reviews, but I can’t help but wonder who will be that into it, outside those who are both extensively literate and academically interested in gender. This Orlando features a few funny moments for levity, but is for the most part a very highbrow exercise. I find myself imagining college students in a Gender Studies class patting themselves on the back for how brilliant they think it is, while neglecting more effectively straightforward documentaries about trans history, like Disclosure (2020) or Paris Is Burning (1990).

Don’t get me wrong: I can easily see why some people love Orlando: My Political Biograph, which is genuinely unusual in what it captures in trans pride and trans joy, as well as its cross section of individuals whose very existence transcends the binary, the assumption of shame regarding certain body parts, or the historic insistence that transness necessitates surgery. For all I know, this film is something for contemporary trans and nonbinary people to connect to; I cannot speak for them. All I can say is whether I managed to connect with it, and at its most experimental, I could not.

The film does feature some clips of the earliest post-operation transgender women to speak to the media, and when Orlando connects that history to the present day, and then features a few young trans and nonbinary children as beacons of the future, then it connects with me. For viewers with just the right amount of patience, this film does have its rewards.

Overall: B