Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022 | COUNTRY | 108 minutes | George Miller)
When last we saw George Miller, it was in the sun-blasted desert of Fury Road for a breathless post-apocalyptic hyper-saturated revolutionary adventure. But aside from his forays into the Mad Max mythology, his oeuvre also includes two movies about dancing penguins, another pair about talking piglets, and a dark adult fairy tale concerning three suburban witches. So, seven years after his chaotic masterpiece, we shouldn’t be too surprised that his return to big screens is less an action spectacle than a return to the realm of storybook fables.
Three Thousand Years of Longing opens with the same text as the A. S. Byatt short story that inspired it. In voiceover on a flight to Ankara, world-renowned “narratologist” Dr Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) introduces herself and sets the scene in the language of fairy tales (“so that here story will sound more believable”). Happily single and content in the world of the mind, Swinton embodies the character with sensibly-styled red hair, comfortable but fashionable academic attire, and suitably scholarly hornrimmed glasses. She’s en route to a conference on the power of storytelling, which also happens to be heavy-handed theme of the film. Immediately upon arrival, we’re made to wonder about the reliability of her narration: she hallucinates a mythical dwarf in the airport trying to steal her luggage and later, before a packed lecture hall, a persistent vision of a ghastly cleric causes her to lose consciousness. Has she become too entwined into the fanciful world of mythology (“how we used to explain things”) or is there a scientific (“what we know so far”) rationale for what’s happening?
While shopping for a souvenir in the winding shops of the city’s storied bazaar, she happens upon a oddly-shaped blue glass bottle in a pile of unmarked artifacts. Like her, it’s perhaps a bit damaged, but still lovely and not without its charms. Although she has claimed to be mentally fit and happy with her life, she does something utterly deranged the next morning in her modern hotel’s bathroom: still in her robe, readying herself for another day of tourism, she uses her own personal electric toothbrush to remove some accumulated dirt from her recently-obtained souvenir. It’s here, with this unsettling choice, that the tale takes a surprising twist: in a puff of cartoonish smoke, a giant, (tastefully) nude Idris Elba escapes from the bottle and fills the entirety of the suite’s bedroom.
Although they’re forced to make their introductions in classical Greek, the recently-freed Djinn calibrates his size and language settings in service of the captive-to-her-own-story Narratologist. It’s a familiar story: he must grant three wishes to be free of service, she’s a scholar of storytelling who knows every trick in the many books about crafty genies and the myriad twists by which well-intentioned wishes go wrong. Lest you forget, this is a story about storytelling and the importance of stories, so a few tales will have to be told before they can come to earn each other’s trust.
And thus, despite the two protagonists being essentially trapped together in a neutral hotel room, the film expands onto a grand tapestry of vibrant tales of how the Djinn came to be trapped in that particular glass chamber. He recounts a torrid unrequited affair with the Queen of Sheba and entrapment by her sorcerer husband; emerging thousands of years later at the hands of an enslaved girl with an unrequited crush on a prince; and finally playing muse to a brilliant young woman trapped in a gilded tower by an elderly merchant husband. Cinematographer John Seale paints each as a rich tapestry fit for a lavish book of children’s tales, with frequent Miller collaborator Roger Ford’s production design filling each setting with whimsical intrigue.
For her part, Alithea remains relentlessly skeptical. She shares a few stories of herself in return — one imaginary relationship, one real one — both quietly tragic, but substantially more terse. Though Swinton and Elba (even wearing prosthetic pointy ears and laboring under the flames of CGI auras) are deeply charismatic performers , the narrative format of the film robs them of time to develop much in the way of chemistry. Though they’re stuck together in a single room talking to each other, most of the action occurs in flashback with simple fabulist narration. Despite how beautiful all of the stories look on the screen, there’s a a persistent degree of separation. They happened a long time ago and are being told only from the perspective of an immortal creature whose fascination with humanity may be real, but whose dramatic remove dampens the sparks of humanity from ever really catching fire in these ancient tales.
While Elba comes close to convincing Alithea that his motives are pure, it’s hard to make the leap to believing that either of the people in the increasingly claustrophobic setting are more than fairy tale characters negotiating a frustrating accord. By the time Alithea comes to a resolution on how to make use of her wishes, the choice comes almost as much of a surprise to the audience as it does to her. Swinton has perhaps done too well to embody a compartmentalized character who barely knows herself; so the revelation of her heart’s truest wish also lands more coldly than it should.
Having the wish granted and could have broken open the film’s dynamic and granted fresh agency to its enigmatic characters, but though the setting changes, the narrative distance of retrospective narration persist. Despite its frustrations, it remains a visual feast that negotiates with big ideas about how we are created by our own stories and how those fit into an increasingly technological world of scientific rationale. If anything it is too sweetly-natured to confront some of the darker shadows and knottier implications of the stories that informed the identities of its protagonists. So while there’s plenty to like in the well-intentioned telling of this tale, but I found myself struggling to find anything to truly love as it reached its concluding pages.
Three Thousand Years of Longing arrives in theaters on August 26th.
Lead image courtesy MGM