With “Three Thousand Years of Longing”, George Miller finds room for all his gifts

The crux of George Miller’s “Three Thousand Years of Longing” begins when a Djinn is released from a bottle in a hotel room in Istanbul. His releaser, and captor, is not the kind of person to enjoy the gift of the three wishes he offers, though. She is an academic of narratology, travelling the world to explore what it is about stories that fascinate us. “I’m a literary scholar,” she tells him early on. “We don’t know much.”

The line is a joke on one level, but it is also – like many things in Miller’s film – working on a deeper level of profundity. Knowledge is one thing, but desire for it – a genuine want for it – is something seductive and powerful. And in stories we can only know so much. And so, in that hotel room in Istanbul, an immortal Djinn and a mortal woman sit opposite each other and embark on a journey of storytelling.

The film’s title is a reference to the time the Djinn has spent entrapped, desperately longing for his release. But even that is a layer that hides something beneath. Even as he weaves the tale of his entrapment, the thousands of years feels more like a tribute to the long reach of stories – their hold on human emotion and the possibilities of imagining impossible worlds for ourselves. This is no accident, of course. Any movie that sets its sights on storytelling as a subject, even tangentially, becomes inextricably metatextual – a rumination on its own nature. And Miller addresses this from the onset. Alithea the academic, played with shrewd clarity by Tilda Swinton, introduces us to the story with narration that feels obvious at first but is its own trick. Swinton’s ability to make ostensibly plain figures into characters of intrigue is well demitted here. Her straightforward stolidity is a fascinating contrast to Idris Elba’s Djinn, who interrupts her life of contentment.

Overtime, “Three Thousand Years of Longing” will morph into many things. Into a tragedy, comedy, romance, flirtations with farce and then something more existential. It is the kind of inexactness that makes the trailer for it – which I mercifully saw for the first time only after already finishing the movie – feel so wrong given the tenderness of the film. Miller’s intent here is ambitious: a world where magic exists but one that is not blinded to life as prosaic. But its ambition is more than in that kind of overt willingness to create a film so unusual in its form, it is also found in the film’s own sincere transparency. Things in “Three Thousand Years of Longing” are never truly surprising. Instead, it offers itself to us with an unabashed earnestness that is almost out of place with the inherent irony of contemporary media. But this sincerity is not one that comes from maudlin. Like Alithea, “Three Thousand Years of Longing” wants to be as straightforward as it can be. And, like Alithea, it is only as we get to know it more that we realise that within its earnestness lies depths of complexities that do not emerge from subterfuge but from not being immediately explored.

Three is a powerful number. So says the Djinn early on, and so we know. Three wishes, three tales of entrapment and three clearly divided sections where we watch the Djinn throughout history. Miller treats each of the three stories as a mini movie in its own right, and how shrewd that none bears any key resemblance to each other. The first, the tale of Solomon (Nicolas Mouawad) and Sheba (Aamito Lagum) features the least dialogue from the characters involved and instead earns its energy from the beauty of the two main figures. Its brevity is its power, setting up a millennia long entrapment and pain. The second is more expansive; it is technically two stories in one but also an ensemble tale covering two periods in the Ottoman Empire and centred on lust – bloodlust and also the more familiarly carnal kind of lust. The third tale is set in the 19th century, and in a deliberate parallel to our main story it finds us mostly in a single room as the power of love turns from expansive to entrapping. As the story sweeps through time, so does the cinematography, moving from sweepingly surrealistic with Sheba and Solomon to sensual and ornate in the Ottoman empire and then, restless and anxious in 19th century Turkey. The modern-day sequences seem visually simple in contrast, until we learn how to look beyond the centre for traces of magic in the familiar present. John Seale, a master cinematographer of both period sumptuousness and contemporary specificity, is perfect for this dance across millennia as his camera begins to perform a seductive bit of juxtaposition across timelines. Everything is performative, nodding to something else so the dissolves from moment to moment feel so profound both for what they are and for what they intimate to us.

And there is a performative nature to Swinton’s Alithea. It is easy, for example, to read Alithea against Tilda Swinton’s performance in last year’s “Memoria” – another film where an introverted Swinton character ventured to a strange land in search of something that felt more existential than corporeal. Miller’s work is, of course, less abstruse than Weerasethakul’s foray into the existential but it is a simplicity that is not predicated on the simplistic. Each time “Longing” ventures to the more visually propulsive tales of splendour, we return to Elba and Swinton in conversation, and we begin to recognise how so many complexities are built into their voices. Swinton has always been sharp at playing repression, and so much of Alithea emerges from what she does not say and what she does not do. She spends more than twothirds of the film in a hotel room (Elba, on the other hand travels through time in various forms) but you look closer and recognise how much Miller trusts her and trusts us to know her. When she finally makes that first wish (of course she does), the exact way her voice shakes on a particular word – naked longing – creeps up on you. And in it reveals her own countenance thus far as a story of herself she was performing, for us, for the Djinn and for herself. Storytelling is a human instinct.

And so, in keeping with narratology, “Three Thousand Years of Longing” is carefully hewn to storytelling in explicit ways, even down to its narration. But even here, it never feels like an excuse to tell and not show. For Miller, showing is telling and telling must be shown. Miller is confident enough in these stories that he impishly teases ending after possible ending (I recognised three potential moments of finishing before the actual end). Endings and beginnings, as endemic as they are to stories, belie the more complex nature of narratology. Does it ever really end? So, even though the story is very distinctly divided into five sections: introduction, first tale, second tale, third tale, conclusion, “Three Thousand Years of Longing” is also very often not really about endings as tidy or partitioning or as exact. Instead, it is more deliberately interested in storytelling, and story-living, as something diffuse. Moment to moment, shift to shift, as if attempting to rupture our own relationships with stories. Even in the main romance that the film poster promises, it feels counterintuitive – the chemistry between Swinton and Elba never tries for sensuousness, instead emphasising an intellectual bond that manages to avoid feeling cerebral. Is this what love is? Words abound here, so much that it is to the credit of all involved that it never feels talky.

But it is not in the words that “Three Thousand Years of Longing” is best, although Miller’s script – co-written with his daughter, billed here as Augusta Gore– delivers a plea for us to listen that is most profound. It is in, instead, the layered textures of the sound design which signal the full gamut of emotional acuity. Horror, action, romantic longing, mystical excursions. They are all found in the sound cues, most discernible in the moody score by Tom Holkenborg (better known as Junkie XL), which strikes the right note of unsettling and plaintive. The recurring motif of the string instruments manifests that very evocative word of the film’s title – longing, achingly acute with every timbre. But it is not just the music. Alithea says a phrase in a moment of ponderance that speaks best to it, “an emanation of an absence”. And it is in the silences, as well as the cacophony, that “Three Years of Longing” weaves its tale of sound and desire – the smash of a bottle, the splash of water on a shore, bodies coming together, dusty sand falling on a floor. There’s something seductively tangible about the sounds here, in full commitment to Miller’s vision, conjuring up so much aural imagery.

Miller’s last film was the behemoth “Mad Max: Fury Road”, the fourth entry in his “Mad Max” series, which provided a grisly and high-octane action drama for the aughts, but Miller’s dramatic and artistic interests are more absurd than even the occasional flight of fancy. This is the man who can pierce something as earnest and sincere as “Lorenzo’s Oil” but also the ridiculous debauchery of “The Witches of Eastwick;” the straight-forward apocalyptic fantasy of the first “Mad Max” and the tonal surprises of the “Happy Feet”. But even when “Longing” touches on all these bits of strangeness – a musical sequence where instruments become anthropomorphic, a brief battle sequence that’s grisly and alarming, a seduction sequence that’s pitiable but also ridiculous, Miller is also gentler, holding back. Not in the sense of reticence, but in a kind of calmness that comes with clarity of vision. Even when “Three Thousand Years of Longing” feels truly unsurprising, it never feels like it needs to overemphasise. There’s a phrase which Alithea repeats in a climactic moment, trying to explain away the magic – we exist only if we are real to others. So precise, and yes obvious; but no less stirring for that obviousness. How can we not read this as self-referential? Of this movie specifically, but all movies. Cinema is one of the newer artforms that centre narratives, but it emerges from a millennia-old obsession with telling stories. In stories, we are real, and we are all possible. “Three Thousand Years of Longing” gets that evocativeness in a film that feels so personal while being conceptual. Two persons believing in each other, and so believing in themselves. But the root of all this “Longing” is just two people in a room, or another room, or in a park talking to each other. Just two people. And isn’t that what a story is when you break it all down? Just people reaching for a connection?