It’s easy to fall in love with this sweet movie
Three Thousand Years of Longing (M, 108 mins)
Directed by George Miller Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★
The airline that delivers Tilda Swinton to Istanbul is called Shahrazad Air. It’s a nice touch, in a film full of minutely observed details and of respect for stories, the act of telling them – and the places, literal and figurative, that stories come from.
Swinton’s Alithea Binnie is an academic who studies stories – a ‘‘narratologist’’. She is in Istanbul to deliver a lecture.
But dizziness, a vision of an ancient ruler and an unsettling encounter with a wild-eyed woman at the airport have all taken their toll.
Alithea collapses on stage and only an afternoon in second-hand shops can revive her. I know the feeling.
Alithea finds a tiny, glass-lidded bottle. She takes it back to the hotel and sets to with her electric toothbrush.
And – boom – just like you’ve seen in the trailer, Idris Elba’s very real and very large genie – or Djinn – enters the picture. Of course, he has three wishes to grant.
But Alithea knows better than most that all stories about Djinns and wishes seem to end very badly.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is an unexpected – and mostly unprecedented – movie.
Maybe only a film-maker as established, independent, eclectic and commercially well-proven as George Miller (Babe, Happy Feet, Mad Max: Fury Road) could have got a script this idiosyncratic and talkative past a production company.
The trailer sells Three Thousand Years as an adventure and romance – and there is adventure and romance here – but it is more a film of ideas.
And of how ideas and conversations around a fireplace can resonate across the years to find their purpose long after the ashes have cooled and daylight has reclaimed the stars.
This is a film in love with the idea of a story, of how mythology is our first attempt at finding a language for science and of how myths retain some elements of truth even when science seems to have overtaken them.
And Three Thousand Years is also a film about the love of films.
Miller is gleeful here, throwing off references to Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now in his earliest shots, before conjuring up ideas and frames from Sally Potter’s genre-bending and intoxicating Orlando, which was, of course, the film that broke Swinton into the mainstream in 1992.
At other times, Three Thousand Years is an old-school epic to match any Disney spectacular. Elba might create his Djinn out of nothing more than a couple of prosthetic ears, a spritz of gold paint and a very eventful pair of yoga pants, but we don’t doubt for a second that there is magic and mystery within him.
While Swinton, adopting a flatvowelled northern British accent that seems like a place where emotions go to die, conjures up a few moments towards the end of the film that are as swoonworthy as any bodice-ripping epic, but out of nothing more than a glance and a raised eyebrow.
Yet, for all its pomp, finery, castles, effects and spells, Three Thousand Years so often circles back to just two people – Swinton and Elba – sitting in their hotel room in their robes, talking. You might even find these scenes some of the most engrossing and hypnotic of all.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is a sweet, thoughtful, occasionally spectacular and always unclassifiable film. It might struggle to find an audience who appreciate it for what it is. But on a big screen, with a proper sound system doing what it was designed to do, it is also a film I fell in love with. Bravo.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is now screening in select cinemas.