A literary two-hander clothed in the maximalist spectacle of a fantasy epic, Three Thousand Years of Longing marks an eccentric career swerve for director George Miller, the 77-year-old Australian Oscar-winner best known for the hugely successful Mad Max, Babe and Happy Feet franchises. Co-starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, this talk-heavy romantic fable is an admirably ambitious oddity for a mainstream director, but also something of a hot mess, lumpy in structure, muddled in message, with visual razzle-dazzle standing in for intellectual and emotional depth. It is a richly flavoursome feast, in fairness, but so is a bag of over-ripe onions.
Miller describes Three Thousand Years of Longing as a “palate cleanser” for his next Mad Max epic, Furiosa, which is due in 2024. Nurtured by the director for decades, the screenplay is based on the title novella in author A.S. Byatt’s 1994 anthology The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, a post-modern riff on fairy tale and folklore conventions, celebrating the form while self-consciously deconstructing it from within. Miller and his first-time screenwriter daughter Augusta Gore retain some of Byatt’s playful metatextual irony, but they cannot resist surrendering to the old-fashioned romance of a thumping good yarn too, striking a tricksy tonal balance that is not wholly successful. Screening out of competition in Cannes, this oddly passionless passion project should generate modest box office heat thanks to its starry cast and MGM’s maketing muscle, but it mostly feels like an indulgent folly, a whimsical holiday romance of a movie.
Miller made Three Thousand Years of Longing in Australia after planned location shoots in London and Istanbul fell through because of the pandemic. Even so, he has largely retained Byatt’s plot and setting, with a little expansion and embroidery. A middle-aged British academic, Alithea Binnie (Swinton), jets into Istanbul for a conference talk on her specialist subject, literary narrative. An emotionally self-contained divorcee with frosty disdain for superstition, Alithea’s key argument is that the folkloric genies, monsters and magical forces that once helped humankind make sense of a scary universe have slowly been rendered redundant by science and technology. But even as she makes this claim, she seems to have slipped through the looking glass into a shadow world of myth and legend.
In classic fairy tale fashion, Alithea picks up an antique bottle in an Istanbul bazaar that opens to release Djinn (Elba), a pointy-eared, goatee-bearded genie with a shape-shifting body and the ability to grant wishes. Once the shock fades, the pair settle down in Alithea’s hotel suite and begin a lengthy discussion of Djinn’s past adventures, including thousands of years imprisoned on the sea bed. Breaking up this cloistered chamber drama, Miller zooms back through the centuries to revisit Djinn’s doomed love for the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum). Centuries later, he vainly tries to protect Gülten (Ece Yüksel), a courtesan caught in the bloodthirsty political crossfire of the Ottoman empire. Later still, he falls for Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar), a proto-feminist scholar with an insatiable thirst for knowledge.
Each of Djinn’s historic examples makes Alithea increasingly wary of choosing her own wishes, since she knows better than anybody that fairy tales are mostly cautionary warnings about vanity and hubris, malevolent tricksters and tragic miscalculations. But it soon becomes clear that Djinn needs her to activate his magical powers to ensure his own survival. “We exist only if we are real to others,” he pleads. As the power balance shifts, and the location moves from Istanbul to London, Three Thousand Years of Longing morphs from dry literary discussion into unlikely romance.
A grand visual stylist above all else, Miller is in his element during Djinn’s flashback sequences, dazzling mini-epics of operatic emotion wrapped in lavish digital pyrotechnics. Some of these inventive CGI flourishes – books that dissolve into bottles, combustible electromagnetic skin, mathematical spells that spiral skywards in swirling arabesques – are superbly rendered. But the film’s closing London chapter, pitched in a more subtle key, falls flat. The erotic chemistry between these ill-matched lovers fizzles where it should sizzle. The mortal dangers Djinn faces in a high-tech modern city clearly symbolise the battle between folklore and science, but they lack emotional bite. Secondary characters, notably Alithea’s racist neighbours, are crudely drawn cartoons. The talking pig in Babe was more convincing.
Chewing manfully on a thick Middle Eastern accent, Elba makes the most of a fun but fairly unchallenging role that puts his superhero physique front and centre. Meanwhile, Swinton hides behind one of her twitchy late-career turns, all brittle nerves, severe hair and broad northern English accent. Both performances are decent enough, but mannered and stilted and hobbled by comically clunky lines of almost George Lucas-level doggerel: “hope is a monster, Alithea, and I am its plaything.”
As visual spectacle, Three Thousand Years of Longing is hard to fault. But in screenwriting and acting terms, it falls short. Rooted in glib attempts to generate awestruck wonder at the magical power of storytelling, Miller’s love letter to fairy-tale fantasy feels like Harry Potter for adults in places. It could almost have been called Fantastic Beasts and How to Date Them.
Director: George Miller
Screenwriters: George Miller, Augusta Gore, based on The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye by A.S Byatt
Cast: Idris Elba, Tilda Swinton, Aamito Lagum, Nicolas Mouawad, Ece Yüksel, Matteo Bocelli, Lachy Hulme, Megan Gale, Zerrin Tekindor, O?ulcan Arman Uslu
Producers: Doug Mitchell, George Miller
Cinematography: John Seale
Editing: Margaret Sixel
Production designer: Roger Ford
Costume designer: Kym Barrett
Music: Tom Holkenborg
Visual effects supervisor: Paul Butterworth
Production company: Kennedy Miller Mitchell (Australia)
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition)
In English
108 minutes
