FILM
QUEER CLASSIC
Orlando
Tilda Swinton, Quentin Crisp, Jimmy Somerville
British cinema was perhaps never more flagrantly queer than Sally Potter’s delicious adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel about a passionate poet who lives through four centuries of British history, changing gender along the way. From Tilda Swinton’s limber, brazenly non-binary turn in the lead to Quentin Crisp’s imperious drag as Elizabeth I, it’s a film with gleeful disregard for the boundaries of identity, sexuality and historical storytelling. Way ahead of its time in 1993, it’s the kind of transgender story we could use more of in 2022.