Orlando, 1992 movie by Sally Potter

Tilda Swinton portraying Orlando

The young aristocrat Orlando makes a promise to Queen Elizabeth the First on her death bed: in exchange for a castle and a land, he will not age neither fade... For 400 years he walks the earth, learning about death, love, poetry, politics, sex, birth... He even swiches genders at some point, learning then about the difficulties of living as a woman. 

To tell the truth, this movie puzzled me. It's quite conceptual I think, and I have not yet read the novel by Virginia Woolf it is based upon, so I might not have understood it all properly; but after seing this, I'll make sure to read it. It is quite fun, actually, and sad, too, but always in a subtle, kind of intemporal way, as if the story was passing by as a rivers do. To feel it, you have to let yourself get carried by the flow.

Epic moment

Shelmerdine arrives grandly, riding a magnificent black horse from the blurs of the fog to the open air; then his beautiful stalion magnificently rears, jerking Shelmerdine off the saddle to the ground, his mouth tightly embracing the mud, his hair a mess, right in from of Orlando, who was also streched over the grass.

SHELMERDINE : You're hurt ma'am?

ORLANDO: I am dead sir.

SHELMERDINE: Dead. That's... serious; can I help?

ORLANDO: Will you marry me?

SHELMERDINE: Ma'am I would glady but hum, but I fear my hankle is... twisted.

My absolute favourite part of the movie is Tilda Swinton. I already enjoyed her acting in the Constantine (...), but here, she's also breathtaking. Her habit of impersonating (splendidly) both men and women is admirable. And the deep of her changing black from clear-blue eyes has a certain way of always astonishing me.

Tilda Swinton as Gabriel in the Constantine