Three Thousand Years Of Longing: A Visually Stimulating Love Letter To Storytelling
Dr. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is an academic -- content with life and a creature of reason. While in Istanbul attending a conference, she happens to encounter a Djinn (Idris Elba) who offers her three wishes in exchange for his freedom. This presents two problems. First, she doubts that he is real and second, because she is a scholar of story and mythology, she knows all the cautionary tales of wishes gone wrong. The Djinn pleads his case by telling her fantastical stories of his past. Eventually she is beguiled and makes a wish that surprises them both.
With Three Thousand Years Of Longing, George Miller contrasts the pulse-pumping adrenaline and testosterone of Mad Max: Fury Road with something altogether more lighthearted and lovey-dovey. The film is essentially a rom-com fable about stories and their power. With a particular focus on the art of storytelling, and told with all the gusto of a master storyteller, the film occupies an interesting space between a portmanteau film and a traditional narrative feature. It’s ostensibly a two-hander that mostly takes place within the confines of an Istanbul hotel room, but its large-scale ambition transcends the restrictions of a mere chamber piece and gives way to some truly transportive moments.
The film centers around an independent and allegedly “desireless” narratologist named Dr. Alithea Binnie (played by the incomparable Tilda Swinton), who serendipitously comes into possession of a Djinn (played by Idris Elba) and his vessel while she’s in Turkey for an academic conference. Once married but long since divorced, Alithea has become comfortable in her solitude and believes herself to be totally content. That is, until she accidentally unleashes the dashing genie whose waited three millennia for the opportunity to be set free.
Knowledgeable in the likes of Djinns, Alithea is hesitant to let the genie turn her deepest desires into a reality, since she possesses the understanding that every story about making wishes is ultimately a cautionary tale. However, being a lover of literature, she’s open to hearing what the genie has to say, and he has many an interesting yarn to spin. As the two share an afternoon in Alithea’s room adorned in hotel robes, Elba’s Djinn feeds Swinton’s Alithea tasty morsels and hearty stories of his misfortunes and lands of long ago.
It’s not a perfect film by a long shot, especially when compared to the relative perfection of Fury Road, but it has many charming qualities to admire, chief among them is Miller’s kinetic verve and cinematographer John Seale’s keen eye. It’s overflowing with confident style and stimulating concepts, so much so that it’s pretty impossible to be bored, even in its weakest moments. Miller gives the film a strikingly vibrant color palette and is so excited by the film and its ideas that he keeps the camera in near perpetual motion, both of which really help to keep the audience engaged.
It gets off to a bit of a clunky start, and holds the audience at a bit of an emotional distance, but it finds its legs and settles into a groove once the genie is released. It’s quite funny, with some of the best moments deriving from Miller’s cartoony sense of humor, and it’s always visually appealing. The performances from Swinton and Elba are as good as to be expected. They each help to bring the film and its fantastical tale into an even greater spirited existence.
The midsection of the film is probably the most solid and enjoyable portion, as we get a lot of visual and narrative variety through the Djinn’s tales, but as it veers out of the anthology format and back into Alithea’s story, it runs into some frustrating turbulence, but it’s fortunately not enough to completely mar the experience. It’s majorly glaring negative is that it doesn’t know how to handle its ending. In a maddening display of fades to black that never seem to end, Miller and co-screenwriter Augusta Gore flounder to find a satisfactory close, and while they eventually find it, they muddle the film’s messaging in the process.
Three Thousand Years Of Longing might not fulfill all your deepest desires, but Miller manages to bottles up a lot of impressive cinema into its petite runtime. Even though it bobbles the ending and gropes about a bit in the dark in its third act, much more of it hits than misses. It’s love for story is certainly infectious, and its grappling with the old world versus the modern one (especially considering its pandemicisms) is admittedly interesting. If anything, the film is proof that Fury Road wasn’t a fluke; Miller still has a penchant for visual flair and panache to back it up, and that there’s a lot to get excited about with Furiosa on the horizon.
Recommendation: If you’re a fan of George Miller and looking for a visually sumptuous blockbuster to see on the big screen, look no further than Three Thousands Years Of Longing. The film will hit theaters exclusively on August 31st.
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