‘Orlando, My Political Biography’ Takes a Collective Approach to Joy

Few movies this year have lived in my head as long and as happily as “Orlando: My Political Biography,” which I’ve been thinking about since I first saw it in September. Written and directed by the Spanish-born philosopher and activist Paul B. Preciado — a trans man making his feature directing debut — the movie is, at its simplest, an essayistic documentary about transgender and nonbinary identity that draws inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando: A Biography.” Yet trying to squeeze “My Political Biography” into a tidy categorical box is fundamentally at odds with Preciado’s expansive project, which is at once an argument, a confession, a celebration and a road map.

It’s also a sharp, witty low-budget experimental work of great political and personal conviction, one that breathes life into Woolf’s novel about a 16-year-old boy in Elizabethan England who, after centuries of trippy adventures, enigmatically ends up as a 36-year-old woman in 1928, the year the novel was published. Woolf dedicated the book to her lover Vita Sackville-West, whose son Nigel Nicolson described it as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” one in which Woolf weaves Vita “in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds.”

Don’t expect luxurious trappings here; this isn’t the usual screen waxworks with meticulous details but few ideas. It is instead a pointed, spirited, up-to-the-minute exploration of sex, gender and sexual difference through the character of Orlando, who serves as Preciado’s mirror and avatar. In the novel, Orlando (long story short!) awakes one day to trumpets blaring “Truth!” and finds that he’s become a woman — a development that is, well, complicated.

“The change of sex,” the book’s narrator asserts, “did nothing whatever to alter their identity.” As Preciado explains, his own transformation was more complex. “You didn’t know, perhaps,” he says, gently addressing Woolf, “this was not how one became trans.”

From the very start Preciado expresses love and admiration for Woolf and her novel, but he also critiques some of her choices; he’s enraged, for one, that Orlando is an aristocratic colonialist. Even so, for the most part he expresses palpable tenderness toward Woolf, a quality that suffuses “My Political Biography” as he loosely re-creates Orlando’s narrative trajectory and plucks characters, episodes and sentences from the book. Along the way, Preciado draws attention to the construction of identity and that of the movie itself, fusing form and subject. While he’s peering behind the scenes (and as crew members drop in and out), he also introduces a chorus of other voices, including that of trans pioneers like the American actress-singer Christine Jorgensen and those of his trans performers.

Preciado’s most provocative conceit is that he shares the role of Orlando with 20 other trans and nonbinary individuals of different ages, hues and shapes. While Preciado largely remains offscreen, other Orlandos enter and exit, introducing themselves to the camera, talking about their lives and — with both naturalism and charming, at times goofy, theatrical flourishes — playing out scenes from the novel, their words mingling with Woolf’s. Like her Orlando, his travels widely (if on a shoestring budget), undergoes metamorphoses and weaves through the centuries. One Orlando (Amir Baylly) wears a magnificent headpiece and shows off his legs; another (Naëlle Dariya) preens in a billowy wig festooned with tiny ships.

By sharing the role of Orlando, Preciado shifts the story from the individual to the collective, taking it out of the private realm and into the public sphere. This communitarian shift from me to we also allows Preciado to attenuate the familiar documentary binarism (and power dynamic) in which there is one person who films and another who is filmed. Everyone is invited to this party. As Woolf writes, Orlando had “a great variety of selves to call upon”; Preciado similarly calls on a multiplicity of selves, at one point introducing a sweet-faced, pink-haired Orlando (Liz Christin) who visits a psychiatrist, Dr. Queen (Frédéric Pierrot), as other Orlandos chat in the waiting room sharing stories, hormones and laughter.

Liz-Orlando’s mother has sent her to Dr. Queen for dressing like a girl and speaking about herself in the feminine. When the doctor asks Orlando how she believed herself “authorized to wear a skirt as a young man,” she answers that she’s not a man. “So you’re a woman?” the visibly confused shrink asks, brow furrowing. “I wouldn’t exactly say that either,” Orlando says with a Mona Lisa smile. The visit to the psychiatrist’s office takes place fairly early on and while the doctor’s bafflement is played for obvious, somewhat uneasy laughs, his inability (or refusal) to truly see Liz-Orlando has a sharp sting that lingers for the rest of the movie.

The office face-off comically distills the rigid medical orthodoxies that Preciado challenges in greater detail in his electrifying short book “Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts,” a published version of a speech that he delivered in Paris in 2019 at a conference of 3,500 psychoanalysts. Having been invited to talk about “women in psychoanalysis,” Preciado instead spoke about, as he put it in his speech, “finding a way out of the regime of sexual difference.” For him, that meant a world beyond the cages of masculinity and femininity, an idea that inspired this audience of putative professionals to heckle Preciado, who writes that he was only able to deliver a quarter of his talk.

“My Political Biography” is lighter and certainly funnier than “Can the Monster Speak?,” though the two work as companion pieces. The movie is serious, which you would expect given the political and personal stakes that one after another Orlando — with open faces and feeling — express. This is, on the one hand, a movie made by a philosopher who studied with Michel Foucault. At the same time, Preciado’s lightness of touch and intellectual nimbleness buoys the movie, lifting both it and you. There is nothing tragic other than the world that insists on policing bodies. Preciado’s superpower in this warm, generous movie is that while he speaks brilliantly to the cages of identity, he sees — and shares — a way out of them. He talks and listens, he exhorts and confesses. He insists on pleasure, speaks to happiness, invites laughter and opens worlds. Here, joy reigns supreme, and it is exhilarating.

Orlando, My Political Biography
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters.