2023-11-28 08:00:00
The philosopher turned filmmaker adapts the work of Virginia Woolf, offering a lively and dissident reflection on trans identity.
Free adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s book, the first film by philosopher Paul B. Preciado is a marvel of intelligence, revolt, humor and gentleness. Narrator of the film, the author of Testo Junkie sets up a dialogue with Virginia Woolf.
The goal is to demonstrate how trans identity can change the course of history, or rather stories, since the film constantly juggles between the story of Orlando, that of Woolf, that of Preciado, but above all that of of a gallery of people who escape the binary of gender and embody a whole spectrum of potential Orlandos, their necks set with a pearly strawberry, a vestige of the nobility of rank of the Woolfian character.
What is first striking is the beauty of the gaze that the philosopher casts on these political and dissident trans bodies, then the way in which the refusal of the binary propagates throughout the film. Neither documentary nor fiction, Orlando, my political biography mixes the personal stories of young trans people with cleverly diverted quotes from the novel. Built in blocks playing with the narrative structure of Woolf’s book, the film is at times very amusing (the cameos of Pierre and Gilles or Virginie Despentes, that of Frédéric Pierrot debauched from In therapy).
Above all, it is crossed by a sublime insurrectional energy. His political project is dissident: to decorrelate the sexual organ from gender, for example to be able to have, as one of the people says, a “female penis” to finally lead to an “abolition of sexual difference at birth”. We discover a Paul B. Preciado that we did not yet know, a joker, but above all a filmmaker, a creator of images with crazy revolutionary power.
Orlando, my political biography by Paul B. Preciado (Fr., 2023, 1 h 38). In theaters November 29.
1701161576
#Orlando #political #biography #Paul #Preciado #dialogues #Virginia #Woolf #big #screen
