In Sally Potter's ambitious 1992 film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's comic novel Orlando now enjoying a limited re-release, Tilda Swinton inhabits a title character whose androgynous beauty as a fawnlike boy so charms an aging Queen Elizabeth I – a real casting coup as the late, incomparable Quentin Crisp truly nails the gender divide embodied by the great queen – that the monarch grants him immortality. "Do not fade, Orlando, do not grow old!"

The idea of an Elizabethan aristocrat who so abhors killing that he undergoes a spontaneous sex change in his sleep, then travels agelessly down through four centuries, was so ahead of its time when Woolf first penned it in 1928 that it's not surprising it took over five decades to turn into a film. The film, at least commercially, was also ahead of its time. "You see, same person, no difference at all – just a different sex

Tilda Swinton in Orlando. Photo: Liam Longman, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

To her credit, writer/director Potter dispensed with much of Woolf's literary conceit: the novelist insisted that the book was a biography, even including an index at the back. Contemporary critics and readers were in on the joke that Orlando was an imaginative valentine to Woolf's dear friend, Vita Sackville-West. As a modernist novel, Orlando falls into the fertile middle period of Woolf's most celebrated work, following Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and preceding A Room of One's Own.

As a film, Orlando's pleasures are mostly front-loaded. The opening set-piece of Elizabeth's court is visually stunning, with cameos by Crisp and Bronski Beat frontman Jimmy Somerville. It's followed by Orlando's ardent and ultimately unsuccessful wooing of the Russian Princess, Sasha (Charlotte Valandrey). While Swinton's take on a feminized boy's magical transformation into an aspiring female poet is  believable the same way we accept the Elizabethan stage custom of boys playing the female characters, the sex change pretty much stops the plot dead in its tracks, with the rest of the film becoming a series of set changes as title-cards flip the centuries by. There's not a whole lot to occupy the mind unless you happen to be an ardent fan of the wit and wisdom of Alexander Pope.

While a must-see for Woolf devotees, gender theorists, and most especially the huge fan-club of the remarkable Tilda Swinton, Orlando represents an intriguing missing link between Swinton's early experimental work for Derek Jarman and her more recent art-house fare, especially the sumptuous I Am Love. This revival exhibition of Orlando leaves ordinary filmgoers with more to admire than to love.