OUT NOW: Three Thousand Years of Longing

While a work trip to Istanbul, scholar Alithea (Tilda Swinton) buys an antique bottle.

When she begins to clean it, she accidentally releases a Djinn (Idris Elba). 

When he offers to grant her three wishes, she is suspicious of its motives.

To clear her mind, the Djinn tells her the story of his life, and the previous times that he was imprisoned in a bottle.

Earlier this year I devoured Kyle Buchanan’s exhaustive oral history of Mad Max - Fury Road.

One of the key aspects of the production was the importance of the film’s dramaturg Nicolas Lathouris.

Throughout the book, Lathouris and his colleague Nadia Townsend reappear to focus, research, interpret and develop the purpose behind every element of the story - they are the ‘why’ behind the film’s spare sense of theme and dramatic construction.

It is fitting then that George Miller’s follow-up to that film would be a movie about story-telling, its purpose and function in our lives and how to make order out of the variables of life.

Storytelling is a constant theme in Miller’s work - at least the films I have seen.

One of the more lambasted aspects of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the subplot involving the lost children who rescue Max, features a striking version of this theme - the tribe’s focus on oral story-telling as a vehicle for preserving the past and creating hope for the future. 

Survival and a fierce humanity are key to Miller’s work - even amid the carnage and violence, there is a deep empathy for the sanctity of life. 

As the Djinn tells his story, it feels like he is using the form to preserve the people he has lost, and the hard lessons he has learned in the course of his long existence. I would like to watch this movie a couple more times to really unpack it more because there is a lot going on in this film and it deserves more words, even if not all of it works.

I was getting quite taken with Three Thousand Years of Longing but the film has a key flaw which scuppered this enjoyment.

The love story is a bust - I was having trouble tracking where the relationship was going and when our heroes started making the love craft the key issue became obvious.

I had heard ahead of time that there were chemistry problems but it still jarred.

When Alithea makes her wish that the Djinn love her, it comes out of nowhere.

I was getting unfortunate echoes of No Time To Die, in terms of how the story suffers from the lack of heat between Elba and Swinton.

Even beyond romantic connection, the two performers feel completely detached from each other. At first, I put it down to the characters they were playing, but as their scenes played out, there was no sense of connection between them. There is no way in which they complement each other. It feels a little hack to put it this way, but when these two people are alone talking to each other, it feels like two strangers talking on separate phone calls. The vibe is off.

Flawed but ambitious, Three Thousand Years of Longing is worth watching, and contemplating. One thing I will give it - it is the first movie I can remember having a lucid dream about. The night after I saw it, I could not stop thinking about it, even after I had passed out.

Now if that is not a compliment, I do not what is.