Orlan­do, My Polit­i­cal Biog­ra­phy review – a dive into the col­lec­tive trans consciousness

As trans peo­ple, we have always had to search to find our­selves. And not just in the obvi­ous way. To see the traces of our­selves in a his­to­ry that sel­dom gave us a name and often wiped us from its pages. We have to read between the lines. We have to look for few­er mate­r­i­al con­nec­tions, echoes and res­o­nances left unex­pressed in cul­ture, whether that’s through Bugs Bun­ny, The Jok­er or Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer.

But Virig­i­na Woolf’s 1928 nov­el ​‘Orlan­do: A Biog­ra­phy’ offers some­thing more tan­gi­ble: it’s a sto­ry about gen­der trans­for­ma­tion, and so count­less trans peo­ple over the last cen­tu­ry have seen them­selves in its gen­der trans­gress­ing hero.

Span­ish philoso­pher Paul B. Pre­ci­a­do con­sid­ered nam­ing him­self Orlan­do at the start of his own tran­si­tion, and there­fore casts a wide vari­ety of trans peo­ple, from all across the spec­trum of age and iden­ti­ty, to play Orlan­do in this adap­ta­tion of sorts. Around a loose re-telling of the nov­el, the film con­sists most­ly of Preciado’s rumi­na­tive nar­ra­tion and inter­views with each Orlan­do that locate inter­sec­tions between their life sto­ries and those of their fic­tion­al namesake.

Pre­ci­a­do makes this tran­si­tion – the adap­ta­tion of a still-liv­ing nov­el – anoth­er of the film’s sub­jects. Through unadorned cin­e­matog­ra­phy we are shown the process: we see Orlan­dos put into cos­tume and make-up; we see back­drops low­ered onto sound­stages. This bare­ness, along­side a total earnest­ness – the female penis is talked of with entire­ly unself­con­scious rever­ie – can make the film feel almost embar­rass­ing. But an hon­est kind of embarrassing.

Many trans peo­ple, myself very much includ­ed, want to for­get the awk­ward parts of our tran­si­tion, before we knew how to wear our gen­der ele­gant­ly. But to erase those parts of our­selves, Pre­ci­a­do argues, is to erase our his­to­ry. To be trans means liv­ing a fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent life to a cis per­son, so to tell our sto­ries we must think in a fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent way; we can­not use a lan­guage that was built to exclude us. A tru­ly trans cin­e­ma must be built from the ground up.

Pre­ci­a­do lays out these argu­ments rig­or­ous­ly and in a direct, ped­a­gog­i­cal way befit­ting his aca­d­e­m­ic back­ground (Orlan­do is real­ly a frag­ment­ed essay film) which some might find cold, per­haps a cis audi­ence who won’t see the same hope for their own and their community’s future in the much old­er and much younger trans peo­ple. But that doesn’t real­ly matter.

Orlan­do: My Polit­i­cal Biog­ra­phy is a dive into the col­lec­tive trans con­scious­ness, a dis­cus­sion between Orlan­dos across time and place, an attempt to dis­cov­er new ways to under­stand and express our­selves. Pre­ci­a­do would rather share con­tra­dic­to­ry per­spec­tives than per­fect his own because he recog­nis­es his film as a prod­uct of its moment. The con­ver­sa­tion and the com­mu­ni­ty will con­tin­ue on fur­ther, but because he cap­tures its sense of flux – of trans­la­tion – his film will con­tin­ue to res­onate even if, like a pic­ture tak­en before we knew how to do our make-up well, it might make us wince while doing so.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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