Vampires, Assassins, and Romantic Angst by the Seaside: Takoma Reviews

Orlando: My Political Biography, 2023

Writer/director Paul Preciado works with a wide range of individuals who are transgender, gender-fluid, or nonbinary to both reenact sequences from Virginia Woolf’s novel and discuss their experiences with gender and, where applicable, transitioning.

An intriguing mix of documentary and fiction mirrors the shifts in the lives of the interview subjects.

I’m a fan of Woolf’s novel and I’m a HUGE fan of the 1992 adaptation starring Tilda Swinton as the titular character. You always have my attention by saying “Orlando,” and this was an interesting, different take on adaptation.

My favorite thing about this film, and something I think is really essential to conversations about people who are gender non-conforming/trans/non-binary/etc, is the way that it shows the very wide range of experiences and personalities of the people in those groups. For some people, clothing is how they express themselves, while other people may need gender-affirming procedures to feel right in their body. There isn’t a monolith that represents “being trans”, and it’s really cool seeing how many different types of people there are who fall under that same umbrella. I had a pleasant friction with the film where it would cut to an interview subject and I would immediately start asking myself, “Okay, is this a trans woman? Is this a non-binary person? Is this a gender fluid man?”. The need to classify is so innate.

If you’ve never read the novel, it follows a young person who has been granted immortality. Living across centuries, he wakes up one day to discover that he has become a woman. A large part of the novel is considering how the same person is treated differently---legally, sexually, etc--just because their gender changes. It’s obvious why this plot is appealing to director Preciado and his actors/interviewees. The novel gets into the idea of what it means to be in the “right” body, and it’s a great launching point for the different scenes and discussions in the film.

My only criticism of this one is that it felt a bit overlong. This might have been the result of a later-than-typical nighttime viewing, but with about thirty minutes left, I felt like the pace and spark of the film began to lag a little. I probably owe this one another viewing.

The film frames all of its sequences around ideas of sex/sexual relationships (except when it takes like 4 seconds to show that she's reading a book), and they hit all these big "woman problems" ideas: the jealous boyfriend, foray into sex work, bi-curious exploration, and finally the controlling husband. I think that the sequence with the people in poverty kind of sums up how I feel the whole movie regarded her story---just incredibly shallow.

I thought that the framing of her story and the way that it presented her conflict with the patriarchal society around her was so shallow that it actually felt like a mockery of people who experience all the things the movie glibly dances around. Taking 2 minutes for a little pity party looking down at poor people was crossing a line for me that the film never recovered from.

I did want to think for a bit about the notion of not taking the film's message (if such a thing exists) seriously, and if the movie is successful in that angle. And I think that the conclusion I came to is that the movie is so clumsy in putting "message moments" right in your face that you can't avoid it. And when you reckon with it, the only conclusion is that (1) it's just being really ham-fisted in how it's presenting things or (2) it's genuinely blind to all the ways that the film is basically mocking the plight of women who aren't incredibly privileged.

It certainly does exist. I just look at it as watching a film with your brain turned off. I found there was enough to the visual style (the opening being shot as if it's a Universal horror film, the colorful Victorian-era London, the kinds of characters who occupy the world) that I was able to fixate on the technical aspects and still appreciate the film. I'm not saying you or other people who took issue with the politics need to look at the film this way and I can understand finding the politics too hard to ignore. That just wasn't my experience, so I still enjoyed my time with the film.

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I'd have been happy to do that if only the "messaging moments" weren't so overt.

I also thought that this was the weakest film, technically, that I've seen from him. The CGI stuff all read to me as fake as opposed to imaginative, and there was a lack of cohesion in the acting that surprised me (though I thought that the actors were strong on their own) given such a great cast.

Given how positively this one was received, especially by people whose taste usually coheres with mine, it's one of the more surprising disappointments of recent memory.

Interesting. And I think shallow might be the right word for me but with a different connotation. Which is to say that I didn't think this was every woman's story, I really thought this was her story, the story of this one very unique creature, whose unusualness turned things upside down. In her case it was a total liberation from sexual mores normally placed on women as well as total liberation from social limitations placed on women's education and intellect which is also explored very clearly and often on-screen, and her perspective that reliance on men, or anyone but herself, is simply illogical and makes no sense. The sex is the most up front of them because it's sex and it always draws the eye but lets not forget the frustrations over her intellect and self-education and how whatshisnames big problem is really that she simply will not come to depend on him.
One wonders if sex wasn't such a hot and touchy and still visually taboo-breaking (which remains a shame) topic among us if we'd be focusing on it over all the other ways she was liberated in this film. I mean, in the end, she is simply the boss. I do think sexual liberation, in the real world because of how much that is the most challenging thing for both men and women, is an important piece but I know I didn't come away from it feeling like that was the only thing the movie or the character was focused on. Like, to me, the most memorable "message moment" if we want to call them that, in the whole movie, is when he throws her book overboard and her friend hands her another one. That was the one that stuck with me.
But again, I also think this was her story and not the story of all women.

I know I had a lot of negative things about Poor Things when I thought back on it, so don't quite know what to make of my 4 star ranking on letterboxd. I'm almost certain that I initially gave it a three, but it's possible I bumped it up at a later date because I just sometimes feel I should give extra credit to any mainstream movie that feels like it's own thing. And Poor Things is sorta that.


But I remember finding much of what I felt it was saying very confusing and muddled. And at times I know it seemed like a movie that leaned into its quirkier elements kinda too hard for me. It felt very 'look at me, look at me, aren't I such a marvelously strange little flower', and I generally find this guy's movies do this kind of thing with a little more finesse.


But, four stars it is. I think sometimes that's what I give anything that at least wasn't boring, but I definitely don't think it deserves what is essentially a pretty high mark from me. It's possibly my least favorite Lanthimos. Maybe by a wide margin

That's fair