Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)
dir. George Miller
Rated: R
image: ©2022 MGM
In the wake of unleashing the most original and spectacular action blockbuster of the 21st century so far, eclectic Aussie filmmaker George Miller has followed up Mad Max: Fury Road with something that feels like a chamber drama by comparison. His new film, Three Thousand Years of Longing, is a meditation on the very nature of storytelling, how our civilization is making the line between technology and magic ever-more-blurry, and the ineffability of a central human trait: the capacity to give and receive love.
That Miller made such a radical turn between projects should be no surprise. Peppered among the (to date) four entries in his signature Mad Max series, the director wrote the gentle fable Babe and wrote and directed its sequel, Babe: Pig in the City. He also cowrote and directed both entries in the Happy Feet series, which are – and I have to credit Wikipedia for delivering this genre description – computer-animated jukebox musical comedies starring the likes of Elijah Wood, Robin Williams, Hugh Jackman, and Nicole Kidman.
Much like Fury Road, Longing is a passion project for Miller that had been gestating in various stages of development for decades. Miller bought the rights to the novella that inspired his latest opus not long after its 1994 release. Included in a collection of short stories by British author A. S. Byatt, Miller adapted The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye for the screen alongside his daughter, Augusta Gore, making the project a family affair.
Besides the film’s wonderful – but, at times, frustratingly brief – flights of fantasy in the stories-within-a-story structure, Longing could easily be staged as a two-hander play. The majority of the action takes place within a single hotel room, albeit, according to the movie, one where Agatha Christie wrote one of her famous murder mystery novels.
Our hero, Alithea, is obsessed with stories. Her raison d'être as a literary scholar is cataloging and classifying every story humans have ever told. It’s a solitary life, but one she enjoys. While in Istanbul for a literary conference, Alithea finds a charming capped bottle in one of the thousands of shops at a sprawling Istanbul bazaar. Upon returning to her hotel room, she uncorks the bottle – with, hilariously, the help of her electric toothbrush to loosen the cap – and an immortal creature belonging to the magical race of Djinn comes pouring out, changing Alithea’s life forever.
I’ll admit I was a little apprehensive when I watched the trailer for Three Thousand Years of Longing. It’s a story that focuses on an Islamic/Middle Eastern literary tradition – Djinn characters are present in the Quran – told by a white Australian man, based on source material written by a white British woman, and centering another white British woman in the narrative.
It so happens that my lovely wife is currently sharing a nostalgic favorite of her youth with me, the TV show Charmed. The series ran on The WB from 1998-2006, and concerned a trio of sisters who discover that they are witches and must use their powers to fight demons, warlocks, and other evil entities. It also so happens that the next episode in the queue, the one we watched immediately after seeing Longing, concerned a Djinn – for the purposes of the show and white people in general, a genie – tricking the sisters into making wishes so he could free himself. The genie in the episode was portrayed in a guest star turn by French Stewart. You know, Harry of 3rd Rock from the Sun fame.
Based on the lowered expectations of a cultural artifact featuring a star of Home Alone 4 playing a genie, let alone the anglicization of the genie trope via titles like I Dream of Jeannie and the Wishmaster series, I shouldn’t have been too worried. Miller and Gore are respectful of the source legend. The casting is wonderfully diverse within the sequences in which the Djinn recounts to Alithea his three millennia of either being trapped in a bottle or being reduced to an ineffectual ghost waiting for humans to release him from bondage.
We might still be in the phase of inclusivity – though I’d argue that it’s changing rapidly – that prioritizes white men having the most frictionless experience when it comes to putting a vision on the screen, but it was welcome to see Miller emphasize the beauty and strength of Black bodies on screen.
The sequence in which the Djinn tells Alithea of his own insatiable love for the Queen of Sheba is breathtaking. He tells of King Solomon’s trickery against the Djinn in order to win Sheba for himself. In Miller’s assured aesthetic style, the fantasy tale looks like something you might see in Beyonce’s 2020 visual album, Black Is King. Sheba is portrayed with stunning regality by Ugandan actress and fashion model Aamito Lagum.
(Miller even slips in a little nod to feminism when the Djinn insists that Solomon travelled the long distance to Sheba, instead of the other way around, which is what the patriarchal legends would have us believe.)
The tantalizing sparsity of the imaginative fantasy sequences within Three Thousand Years of Longing felt like a disappointment, but I think that’s on me. As I called attention to in my introduction, you should never be too sure you know what you’re going to get from George Miller. Where Fury Road was pure cinema, laser-focused on motion and action via eye-popping practical stunts, Longing is largely a movie about words. It’s a dialog about the stories we tell and how they make the human experience richer.
The fantastical imagery for the Djinn’s stories – there are, naturally, three tales within the main narrative – are wonderfully rendered, with trippy, but always subtle, CGI that draws you into the world of the movie. It brought to mind the work of another favorite fabulist storyteller: Terry Gilliam. Specifically, Miller’s One Thousand and One Nights aesthetic for his picture’s tales-within-a-tale echoes the Ottoman sequences from Gilliam’s wildly underrated The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
Miller also uses the Djinn legend to explore universal human truths, longings, and desires. The raw need of we social creatures to be seen and acknowledged by our peers is summed up beautifully in the movie with the sentiment that we don’t exist if we are not known to others. We discover that this is the ultimate curse for the Djinn as he tells Alithea of either languishing in a bottle or being little more than a felt presence to the humans around him.
Idris Elba is in reliably fine form as the Djinn. There is a quiet weariness to the character and Elba makes us feel every grain of sand that the Djinn has seen slip through the hour glass over his millennia of imprisonment.
Alithea is nervous. She knows, as an expert literary scholar, that every tale involving the granting of wishes is a cautionary one. She suspects – as we do – that the trope of Djinns being tricksters who willfully misinterpret wishes in order to spread chaos might be at the heart of this Djinn’s motives.
As Alithea, Tilda Swinton extends the quiet, restrained screen presence that she adopted for 2021’s ethereal Memoria. One of the most exciting things about Swinton as a performer is her seemingly effortless ability to vacillate between quiet, contemplative character interpretations, as in Orlando or Broken Flowers, and gonzo, go-for-broke work in films like Snowpiercer or Okja. Like Elba’s performance, Swinton imbues Alithea with a quiet, almost unassuming sadness that gives the film a palpable pathos.
Within the themes that Miller is exploring is the idea that our technology is becoming closer and closer to magic. During their time together, Alithea and the Djinn surmise that all the invisible cell phone transmissions and other high-tech communications signals zipping through the air are too much for the Djinn to process. Humans are creatures of dust, he tells Alithea, whereas his race are creatures of electromagnetism, further blurring the lines between ancient magic and modern-day science.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is nothing like what I expected George Miller’s follow up to Mad Max: Fury Road would be. It’s a contemplative and melancholic meditation on the power of love. One of the things that makes that mysterious human trait so central to our existence is, as the movie says, that it must be given freely. Otherwise, it’s completely meaningless.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- I would have loved more bonkers fantasy sequences than Miller gave me in Three Thousand Years of Longing, but the contemplative, melancholy tone was an unexpected treat. This isn’t a masterpiece from Miller, but neither is it a disappointment.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The one thing I didn’t fit into the main review that I regret leaving out is the quirky and inventive sound design of the movie. Miller’s audio team creates a soundscape that leads to seemingly incongruous sounds blending into each other, like applause into a noisemaker or a heavy sigh into applause.
- The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it side story of Enzo, the notebook paper boy was a wonderfully whimsical little bit of animation.
- I really enjoyed Miller’s slow, roaming camera in the hotel scenes.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Saw this on a sleepy mid-afternoon Saturday. Not many people in attendance, a testament to the fact that the movie bombed on its opening weekend, most likely to be forgotten.