This adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel tells the story of the young aristocrat Orlando, who begins an epic quest for love and freedom at the court of Elizabeth I as a man, and completes the quest 400 years later as a woman, shattering her biological and cultural destiny. Unlike in other films, we see that there is no distinction between the active and the passive gaze due to the transformation of gender. The film powerfully translates Virgina Woolf’s modernist universe in terms of destabilising subjectivity. Orlando, with his comments to the camera, mentions other literary references such as Shakespeare’s Othello or the poet Alexander Pope.