So this is a movie based on a Virginia Woolf story that I’ve never read, the short version of which is: Queen Elizabeth gives a young nobleman the deed to his property, but commands him to never grow old. So he doesn’t, but a couple of hundred years later, he does turn into a woman, and complications ensue.

With Tilda Swinton playing Orlando as both genders, and Quentin Crisp playing Queen Elizabeth, this feels like it was probably an important LGBT movie in the ’90s, as well as being a movie that hits a lot of feminist notes (and is directed and written by a woman, Sally Potter).

So this is a case where the movie wasn’t what I wanted it to be — I find the “ageless gender-changing person who lives through centuries” conceit to be fascinating, and wanted the movie to really be about that, to explore what it would be like to have lived through those centuries of history.

But that’s not what the movie does; it treats the premise as more of just an almost poetic hook on which to hang little episodic scenes. Orlando falls in love; Orlando becomes an ambassador to Constantinople; Orlando wakes up as a woman; Orlando falls in love again; Orlando rides a motorcycle with her kid. Decades pass in a scene transition, there’s very little interest at all in Orlando’s interiority, it just kind of skips lightly and dreamily through time, dropping in for a moment here and there.

It’s a gorgeous movie, with lush sets and costumes and a painterly look, and the premise is interesting, but I at least kinda wish the story had a bit more meat on it.