THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING
Genie therapy…
George Miller’s long-gestating follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road is unlikely to be greeted with the same fervour as that 2015 classic. But it’ll serve as a broadly enjoyable palate cleanser before Furiosa rides along.
In many ways, Three Thousand Years Of Longing is everything Fury Road isn’t. Namely: incessantly talky and virtually devoid of action. That’s because, for a significant time, the main characters – Tilda Swinton’s ‘narratologist’ Alithea and Idris Elba’s pointy-eared Djinn – are confined to an Istanbul hotel room, where lonely Alitheia is attending a conference.
Discovering a curious bottle at a bazaar, Alithea releases the benevolent genie and is promised three wishes in return. To put her Monkey’s Paw concerns at ease, the Djinn tells Alithea how he ended up in a glass-blown cell, a tale spanning dynasties, continents and millennia. Though the pair spend a good while philosophising in bathrobes, each of the Djinn’s tales transports us far beyond the hotel. From the court of the Queen of Sheba – a world of myth made real – to the Ottoman Empire and 19th-century Turkey, each fable is an enchanting flight of fancy.
A hopeless romantic, the Djinn has ended up in so much trouble because he’s always falling for the women who release him. Alithea, meanwhile, “finds feelings through stories”. It doesn’t take a geni(e)us to work out where the pair are heading. But as a love story, the film doesn’t allow its characters to develop the depth of emotion we’re supposed to believe they share. The screenplay, written by Miller and his daughter Augusta Gore, isn’t short on ambition, doubling as a sweet ode to storytelling itself. Yet it throws up some honking dialogue (Exhibit A: Elba asking “You want us to make lovecraft?”).
It’s far more successful as an Arabian Nights-style collection of short stories, its fantastical flashbacks bringing Miller’s visual invention to the fore. From a musical serenade performed with living instruments to a moment of phantasmagorical horror that evokes Carpenter’s The Thing, Miller remains a unique visualist. The VFX intentionally fall short of a photoreal threshold, adding to the storybook aesthetic.
An oddball addition to Miller’s wildly eclectic filmography, Three Thousand Years Of Longing doesn’t entirely succeed on its own terms, but remains as daring and experimental as anything he’s committed to the screen.
THE VERDICT George Miller combines myth, magic and romance to mixed effect in a visually dazzling adult fairytale starring a committed Swinton and Elba.
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THE REVENANT
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