DIRECTOR: George Miller
CAST: Idris Elba, Tilda Swinton, Aamito Lagum, Burcu Gölgedar, Matteo Bocelli, Kaan Guldur, Jack Braddy, Hugo Vella, Pia Thunderbolt, Anna Betty Adams, Alyla Browne
RUNNING TIME: 108 mins
CERTIFICATE: 15
BASICALLY…: A lonely scholar (Swinton) is given three wishes by a magical djinn (Elba)…
NOW FOR THE REVIEW…
George Miller’s résumé is pretty expansive, to say the least. The Australian filmmaker has made comedies, family movies, animated films (which won him his only Oscar to date), and by far and away one of the greatest action flicks ever made with Mad Max: Fury Road, but now he’s stepping into an all-new realm for Three Thousand Years of Longing: the arthouse genre.
Miller’s follow-up feature to that Oscar-winning masterpiece could not be any more different, and anyone going in expecting just as much high-octane stunt work or impeccable how-the-hell-did-they-shoot-that camerawork will find themselves at a significant loss here. This is a much smaller, even quieter (due to this film barely having a musical score) film than Fury Road, but Miller’s keen eye for impressive, other-worldly visuals remains, as does his keen ambition – however, Three Thousand Years of Longing equates itself closer to the type of dry, contemplative arthouse feature (albeit one with a slightly bigger budget) you’d almost expect from the likes of Terrence Malick or Michel Gondry, over the guy who made not one but two Happy Feet movies. That alone produces some mixed results, for while it’s undoubtedly gorgeous to look at, it can’t help but feel just a bit too empty as a theatrical experience.
The film begins as lonely British narratologist Alithea (Tilda Swinton), a scholar who specialises in the art of storytelling, arrives in Istanbul for a conference. Whilst visiting the markets, she comes across an interesting looking bottle in a souvenir shop, and upon returning to her hotel room she manages to open it, unleashing a magical djinn (Idris Elba) in the process. The djinn tells Alithea that she has three wishes that he can grant her, but she is reluctant to even make one, knowing all too well the cautionary wishing stories she has studied inside and out. In response, the djinn proceeds to tell her his own story, spanning millennia as he passes from one wish-maker to another, including the powerful Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), sultans and concubines in the Ottoman Empire, and most significantly Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar), the young wife of a Turkish merchant whom the djinn soon falls in love with. It is this latter story that moves Alithea to a point where she finally decides on a wish, one that will impact both her and the djinn for the rest of their days.
When I say that Three Thousand Years of Longing is a much, much smaller film than Fury Road, do not take that lightly. Despite multiple scenes set throughout several periods of rich history, most of the action is relegated to this one hotel room with Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, like it’s an odd mix of Aladdin and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. The historical/fantastical stuff is reserved for extended flashbacks, narrated by Elba’s djinn with occasional interruptions by Swinton’s Alithea, as though you are watching a visual representation of an audiobook. That, however, is where the main fault of this movie lies: it is so reliant on long-winded descriptive prose that often it feels as though we should be listening to it rather than seeing it, and while the visuals we’re given are often pretty stunning (the film was shot by Fury Road cinematographer John Seale, so it is at least colourful to look at), they don’t quite match the heavy, blunt story that is being told in front of them. For a film that is supposedly all about the art of storytelling, it never quite figures out how to transcend from just being a story one would, say, read to their children as a bedtime tale, to a visual medium that favours imagery to tell such stories rather than words.
Even though it is a film that doubles down to a fault with its storytelling, it’s still not as engaging, or even as emotional, as it perhaps could be. Elba and Swinton are both great actors, and they are as good as ever here too, but their characters never feel fully formed, trapped within this screenplay by tons of exposition as the djinn is imprisoned within his bottle, and leaving precious little room to actually develop them as people we’re supposed to be interested in. This especially becomes apparent when, late in the film, things take a turn where you are undoubtedly meant to have some sort of emotional investment in these two, but because most of their scenes together have primarily just featured dialogue that’s described chapters’ worth of story, by that point you’ve surrendered most of your interest in them due to how the film kind of does as well. You’re left with two dry, thinly defined characters who very suddenly expect the viewer to care about them, and it falls flat from the fact that you honestly don’t all that much.
While it’s not an especially enlightening or engaging narrative that fully demands a big-screen experience (to a point where it honestly doesn’t surprise me that this movie has already flopped in the US, because it really isn’t the kind that seems most appealing to mass audiences), Three Thousand Years of Longing is still an interesting watch. Some will inevitably warm to the drier storytelling more than others, but one thing that cannot be denied is how beautifully made it is. The cinematography, set design, make-up, and even the background CGI is excellently crafted, all conducted by Miller whose gentler approach as director and co-writer (with Augusta Gore) is still as passionate as anything else he’s made. However, anyone hoping for something quite as mad or insane as the trailer implies will be a little let down by the actual film; I was certainly hyped after seeing it, because it had been made out to look like a Terry Gilliam movie on steroids, only to be rather surprised by how mundane and grounded the whole thing really was. For me, there were certainly some interesting things that were keeping my attention (mostly the visuals), but an emotional disconnect from the characters and even the stories being told made it quite the comedown from the high that was Mad Max: Fury Road.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Three Thousand Years of Longing is an interesting if flawed change of pace for director George Miller, who still displays keen artistry in the dazzling visuals, but an emotional disconnect from both the heavy and long-winded storytelling, and the dryly written characters, leave it as an ambitious but somewhat empty experience, which is especially noticeable in comparison with the filmmaker’s previous works, particularly the all-out action masterpiece that was Mad Max: Fury Road.
