Unspooling the fashionable side of film
Nathalie Atkinson’s series at Revue looks at the movie that launched Tilda Swinton
“People always ask, who’s your style icon?’
“I always say Fred Astaire,” Nathalie Atkinson is telling me. “It was never Ginger. It was always Fred.”
A seasoned style watcher, who has now also morphed into an Old Hollywood-whisperer in this town, the journalist goes on to say: “Any interest I have in fashion always came from character-building in films.”
Pursuant to her interests, then? A rare, big-screen unspooling on Thursday of 1992’s Orlando, the latest à-la-mode showing in her year-old Designing the Movies series at the Revue (Toronto’s oldest endur- ing cinema).
The rocket ship on which Tilda Swinton effectively launched — putting the then-31-year-old on the path to becoming one of the great actresses of her generation — the gender-bending, timeshuttling Sally Potter-directed movie is a visual OMG. And, hence, right up Atkinson’s alley: the aim of her cult-hit series — consisting of a movie and an onstage conversation — is not just to look at “fashion on film,” but to flesh out the “craft of the set, costume and art direction.” Plus the “narrative dimensions those things add to a film.”
“It’s my white whale movie,” Atkinson says of Orlando.
“White whale?”
Turns out when she was formulating the idea of her film syllabus — having been given carte blanche by the enterprising director of programming at the Revue, Eric Veillette — she always had Orlando on her mind, but it took until now to get just the right print. After showing a slew of other visually arresting movies from across the decades — everything from Heathers to American Gigolo to The Women — her wish was finally granted. “Orlando is an art-house film in period trappings,” Atkinson says. “It looks like a Merchant Ivory film at first glance — all crinoline and frills — but it’s actually very high concept.”
Moreover, its influence continues to be felt in that it was costume-designed by the now legendary Sandy Powell, who got her first Oscar nomination for it. She’s been nominated 12 times, in total, since. And won thrice: for Shakespeare in Love, The Aviator and Young Victoria. But it all started with Orlando.
For Atkinson, the showing of the movie has another bittersweet coda, one germane to a certain current of the Toronto media/society set. Her special guest for the night was slated to be sharp-witted curmudgeon-about-town David Livingstone, an erstwhile writer for the Star (among other publications), as well as an indomitable authority on all things fashion. Alas, he died suddenly just a couple of months back.
Livingstone, Atkinson says, interviewed Swinton way back when, when Orlando premiered here during the Toronto International Film Festival. He even took Polaroids of the fledging fire-haired Scottish actress, photos which Atkinson has now inherited. And though she remains wistful that he won’t be at the Revue, she’s fortunate to have snagged Anne Dixon as her guest. Dixon’s the costume designer of the new Anne of Green Gables TV reboot Anne, and game to talk about “gender and self-fashioning identity through clothing.”
What seems interesting to me is that Orlando is clearly a movie so influential, style-wise, that you can see its DNA in the work of many other directors — in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, for instance, or Todd Hayne’s Velvet Goldmine.
On the catwalks, too, it continues to be a cue, as exemplified by the Burberry fall 2016 collection, which was explicitly inspired by Orlando. But, having said that, it’s possibly one of those movies that many people reference without having actually seen it. It’s just been mysteriously absorbed in the culture.
It’s a school of thought not exactly unpersuasive to Atkinson. With her mode of quiet self-deprecation and a canny style that conjures up a more grown-up Tavi Gevinson, she says film lovers are craving an un-Netflix experience like the one she’s creating and it’s something that is seeing a renaissance in Toronto. (Her series is just one of several at the Revue.)
“Seeing a movie with other people, on a big screen is a shared experience,” she elaborates. “Different things happen that when you watch at home alone. It’s not quite like being at a stage play, but it’s something close: the energy changes. I inevitably end up seeing something I’d never seen or hearing a piece of dialogue differently.”
Indeed, her dirty little secret is that she has never seen Orlando on the big screen. Growing up in Timmins, it never came to the theatre and her whole relationship with the film came via the Blockbuster Video era.
So when she shows the film on the big screen for her series it will be all new to her, too.
Moving on, our conversation lurches and swerves, as it’s destined to do when one is talking motion pictures with Atkinson. She mentions the deep “Freudianism” in Rebel Without a Cause. So what’s next for her series, post- Orlando?
She plans to show Rear Window, starring Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly. Not only is it an “encapsulation of Hitchcock’s single-set architecture and voyeurism” but it’s also beyond relevant now in that “we’re all peeping Toms now . . . and we all live in a culture of surveillance.”
The film nut leaves with one parting pensée about Kelly’s role in the film. “I always joke that she was the first ‘influencer.’ Her character is someone who has to wear the clothes of designers and be seen at parties wearing them.”
Roll the credits, will ya?