Mark Reviews Movies: THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING

Three Thousand Years of Longing, Metro Goldywn Mayer Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 25, 2022

Two people sit in a hotel room and tell stories to each other. That's the premise of Three Thousand Years of Longing—until, unfortunately, it isn't, which is a discussion for later. Co-writer/director George Miller's movie is a fun and engaging dissection of why we tell stories—again, until it isn't and, again, unfortunately so.

The gimmick here is that it's technically only one person doing the storytelling in that room. The other has the form of a human, but in reality, he is a djinn, an immortal, wish-granting being of mythology. The human, by the way, is a woman named Alethia (Tilda Swinton), a narratologist whose life and career are devoted to studying the origin, meaning, and enduring significance of myths like that of the djinn (She's also named after the Greek goddess of truth, in case the name doesn't quite seem to a London-based academic).

She knows a thing or two about the Djinn, referred to only as such and played by Idris Elba, and his stories, because that's her job. He knows more than a thing or two about the reality of those "myths," because they were his life. The screenplay by Miller and Augusta Gore, based on the short story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" by A.S. Byatt, quickly establishes a nice and amusing meta-level of tension in this dynamic.

Alethia begins with some narration about the veracity and unlikeliness of her story, so she frames it as a fairy tale. On a trip to Turkey for a conference, the academic finds a glass jar in a market and buys it as a memento of her trip.

Upon trying to clean the jar in the bathroom sink, Alethia opens the lid, and a giant plume of blue and purple smoke fills the room, before a giant foot forms from the colorful mist. She discovers the Djinn, standing like a giant, in her hotel room. After getting past a language barrier (He's quick to learn English), The Djinn gives her the usual spiel: Because she freed him, he's here to grant Alethia three wishes of her heart's desire. She doesn't particularly want anything, but the Djinn is quite insistent that Alethia make her wishes. Hs freedom depends on it.

An additional level of tension, of course, comes from something Alethia knows and that the Djinn won't readily admit about genies: They can be tricksters, too. Every story about wishes, Alethia points out, is a cautionary tale, so why shouldn't this story, the one that the scholar and the immortal being are writing in this very moment, be any different?

The setup here is one big and pretty clever game. That game isn't only in how these two characters use their respective knowledge and experiences to assess and convince each other over the course of a lengthy discussion/debate about the nature of stories. It's also in how Miller uses the tales, as well as the characters' telling of and reaction to those stories, to get at some core facts about who these characters are, what they want, and how far they're willing to go to get those things.

The story covers millennia of history, from an African kingdom to the fall of a great empire to the north, and myth, from mystical creatures living among people to various forms of magic—as well as the blending of history and myth within religious tales, such as the Queen of Sheba and what really happened between her and the Hebrew king Solomon. All of it, though, comes back to those two characters in that hotel room in Istanbul, as the Djinn tries to figure out what the woman really wants—if she wants anything beyond her "content" life—and Alethia decides whether or not she can trust the genie, his stories, and, for that matter, her own understanding of these tales and herself.

The narrative, then, is divided between the conversation in the hotel room, which Swinton and Elba play with a palpable and intelligent sense of tension, and the Djinn's stories, which span nearly the 3,000 years of the title (The story of these two is part of it, too). Miller shows plenty of visual imagination in presenting these tales, with the court of Sheba (Aamito Lagum) filled with mythical creatures and a stringed instrument belonging to Solomon (Nicolas Mouawad) also playing harmony and percussion by way of magical appendages.

Betrayed and forgotten to the ages, the Djinn is trapped in a brass container, only to found or sensed by others in the ensuing centuries. They are a woman in love and blind to the danger around her, a prince with some djinn heritage who could use the genie for ill (He admits he doesn't care, as long as it would mean being free), and an amateur inventor, with whom the Djinn falls in love.

These stories, as well as what they teach and mean to the main characters, matter here, but with them, Three Thousand Years of Longing makes an intrinsic promise that its wider story will matter and amount to something, too. When the conversation is finished and the tale of Alithea and the Djinn does become its own story, though, Miller and Gore rush through a clichéd, formulaic tale that neither lives up to nor feels like a suitable companion for the stories that have come before it.

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