George Miller holds a special place in Aussie cinema, thanks largely to the Mad Max films (soon to be supplemented with Furiosa), so it might surprise folk that Three Thousand Years of Longing is only his tenth stand-alone feature - not including the excellent segment from Twilight Zone: The Movie, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, with John Lithgow. The legendary New Yorker Magazine critic, Pauline Kael said this about Miller, in relation to the aforementioned film, "Miller's images rush at you; they're fast and energising." Well, not much has changed in the nearly 40 years since she wrote this, if anything, he's picked it up a notch with Fury Road and, to a lesser extent, his latest film. This is based on a short story by A.S. Byatt called The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, and it stars two shining lights in Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba.
Swinton plays Alithea, a narratologist, a collector of stories, who uncovers an odd looking bottle in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar. Back at her hotel, she inadvertently uncorks Elba's Djinn (genie), who offers her the traditional three wishes. Alithea isn't so eager to fall for any potential trick and so resists until she learns more. A conversation begins, pepping up the story with Miller's visual flourishes (Kael's noted images), with no little help from ace cinematographer, John Seale and editor, Margaret Sixel. The Djinn runs through three tales of desire, entrapment, loneliness, greed and folly, at times interrupted by Alithea, bringing us back to the more prosaic present.
The balance of past and present, of the mystical and the modern is just about right but it's hard not to feel a bit shortchanged with these shifts, The ancient scenes are just more fun, though Swinton and Elba's sparring and eventual thawing is nice to watch. My only slight reservation in the story was the hint that Alithea's racist old biddy neighbours (coincidentally, one of them is Anne Charleston, from Neighbours!) may have been proven right about people not belonging to some places. I don't think this is what the film is trying to say but it didn't exactly sit right with me. Ultimately though, hope is rewarded, connections are developed and seemingly enhanced, and the film does its best to deliver a swirl of cinematic enchantment.
See also:
Miller's Mad Max tetralogy (1979, 1981, 1985 & 2015) are the business, and the Ottoman setting puts me in mind of Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), though I can't remember if it's good or just overblown.
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