Three Thousand Years of Longing lays all of its cards out on the table without reservation. This is a film about captivating narratives that is itself a fetching, fantastical odyssey through the memories of two people. It is also a film about loneliness, the conflicts between science and myth, about desire, autonomy and fate. We know this because it tells us all of these things bluntly in its dialogue.
This approach may be enlightening and moving, but it can also be a bit anticlimactic and unnecessary. When one of the lead characters, a Djinn, or an immortal Genie-like creature embodied by Idris Elba, says to the other principal, an academic played by Tilda Swinton, “You and I are the authors of this story,” it’s already something like the 15th mention of the word “story.” The thematic signpost’s repeated utterance takes a bit of the life out of the otherwise bewitching mood set by director and co-writer George Miller. Yet, though the pleasures of Three Thousand Years of Longing may be a touch overdetermined, its aesthetic wonderment and sweeping spectacle are its lasting impressions.
The film, the 77-year-old Miller’s 10th feature and long-awaited follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road, follows Alithea (Swinton), a professor of mythology staying in Istanbul for a work conference. After she nabs an aged glass bottle from the depths of a bin in the city’s marketplace, she summons a Djinn (Elba) who has been contained within it for many human lifetimes. He gives her three wishes — “I’m familiar with the concept,” she quips in return — but has trouble thinking of something she desires, considering herself basically fulfilled. This prompts a deep dive into the multiple “incarcerations” the Djinn has endured and the failed attempts to grant his subjects wishes in the past, stretching as far back as Jerusalem BC, as well as a comparatively brief inquiry into Alithea’s personal history, all of which the Australian maximalist director realizes with vivid detail.
And oh, what detail. With the help of roving, active camera movements from DP John Seale, Miller stages the tales the Djinn recounts with glee and zest, splashing amorous, bloody crimson in almost every frame — on regal garments, in plumes of smoke; even Swinton’s clipped bob is clay red. He conjures some truly arresting imagery, such as dissolving books of knowledge into glass containers, and the computer-generated effects with which he does it are mostly eye-catching and effective, if at times a little overly shiny and cartoonish. One of the film’s more subtle explorations is also found in the emphasis on skin tone and the identities and, yes, stories etched into bodies.
While Three Thousand Years of Longing’s pair of solitary people convening in a hotel room calls to mind the recent Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, its visual palette suggests Alain Resnais’s similarly late-career, nuttily earnest Wild Grass, which was bursting with saturated colors, its frames boasting a filmic grain and featuring aging, yearning characters slipping in and out of dazed fantasies. Where Miller’s movie ultimately hews closer to Leo Grande, though, is in how the revelations about love and life that are ultimately revealed are rather pedestrian and expected. Its character beats are well-intentioned and genuine but nonetheless unsurprising. Similarly, the stories the Djinn expounds, while visually impactful, are sometimes curiously short on imagination. Perhaps the point is that history is besot with tale after tale of missed connections and unrequited affection, but the visions from an alternate history sometimes strike one as a missed opportunity for something truly wild and left-field to be brought to life.
Still, it’s all executed with such commitment that it’s tough to quibble too much with the particulars. Elba convincingly portrays an all-powerful, shape-shifting, undying spirit but it is Swinton who really shines, turning in yet another exciting and thoughtful performance in a career full of them. Speaking in what seems to be her natural British accent, the actor somehow finds new postures and dispositions that we haven’t quite seen from her before, a way of walking and carrying herself that reveals how Alithea’s appreciation for the world is at a disappointed remove. True to its fable-like nature, I suppose, the screenplay mandates that she vocalize and pontificate on that melancholy as if Swinton doesn’t convey everything we need to know with the way she simply enters a room or descends a staircase.
Photo courtesy of United Artists Releasing
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