Potter's adaptation of Orlando very much begins, as it ends, as a story of personal development and ultimate freedom. Orlando is introduced as a sensitive young man, more at home in his pastoral setting, who simply craves another. The introductory female voiceover is interrupted by the character himself at the moment of pronominal identification: "But when he- that is, I" (Tilde Swinton's Orlando interjects, looking straight at the camera) - cam into the world (the voiceover continues), he was looking for something else. Though heir to a name that meant power, land and property, surely when Orlando was born, it wasn't privilege he sought, but company." From the outset, subjective camera techniques inscribe the viewer as complicitious company with a shared horizon of understanding so that eventually the audience has become so complicitous that words are superfluous - Orlando's knowing gaze in the audience's direction suffices to punctuate key moments of the diegesis with shared irony. Thus Orlando's desire and future are always assured in Potter's film, and indeed will come to literary success, a beautiful daughter, and a singing angel who proclaims, "At last I am free. At last, at last, to be free of the past. And of a future that beckons me. I am coming, I am coming. Neither a woman nor a man. We are joined, we are one, with a human face." Granted, this figure parodies the movies teleological drive as signalled by the constant motivation for change: Potter's Orlando never changes because Queen Elizabeth stipulates perpetual youth as the condition for granting him property; Potter's Orlando becomes a woman because he will not take up arms and kill another; Potter's Orlando eschews marriage; and so on. Potter claimed that these alterations were necessary "to strengthen some of the narrative muscle for cinematic purposes- to supply little bits of motivation for the story's premise, to make it psychologically convincing on film.