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‘Potter’s utterly sui generis gender-bender period piece features Tilda Swinton as an immortal nobleman who inherits his parents’ house back in 1600 from a dying Queen Elizabeth I on the condition that he “not fade,” weathers a catastrophic affair with a Russian princess and then, while serving as ambassador to Constantinople and approaching his 200th birthday, is shocked one day to awake and find himself a woman, unable to lay hold on her property, which she struggles to do through passing centuries, right up to the then-present-day 1990s. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel but, rather than following it to the letter, boldly taking liberties with the text, a cinematic equivalent of Woolf’s own searching literary inventions.’ Metrograph