Djinn the beginning...
George Miller's directorial career, which only now arrives at Feature Film #10, 43 years after his debut, consists basically of only weird movies and very weird movies, which should make me pause before saying that Three Thousand Years of Longing is the weirdest, and yet here we are. This is, effectively, his "one for me" after getting back into the American film industry's good graces, and reminding his audience how much we love him, with 2015's masterful Mad Max: Fury Road. This is funny, because Fury Road was also a "one for me" that, if I recall correctly, only managed to break even financially by the slenderest of margins, if indeed it did so at all. So perhaps Miller is going to be alternating between "one for me" and "one for me and only me", rather than the more common "one for them".
And if that turns out to be the case, that's just fabulous, and I hope more studios line up to set money on fire on his behalf (our current subject, for example, is on track to lose a good three-quarters of its $60 million production budget). Three Thousand Years of Longing has good things about it, and it has bad things about it, but there's no mistaking this as any kind of compromised vision; it is a film that is fully intoxicated by itself and deeply inspired to be the most version of itself it knows how to be, given a finite budget and a production that had to be massively reduced in ambition once pandemic travel restrictions started showing up in 2020 (it was entirely shot in Australia, despite taking place entirely in Turkey and England).
The script was adapted by Miller & Augusta Gore from a short story by A.S. Byatt that I have unfortunately not read, though the bones of it certainly have the unmissable feel of literary fiction. Sometime around now (there are people wearing masks, but nothing seems to be happening over Zoom), Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is a literary scholar giving a conference presentation in Istanbul, on the theme of mythology and its function in contemporary society (you will be shocked - shocked! - to know that comic book superheroes are involved). Back in her hotel room, she's about to get a crash course in the practical application of her ideas, when the ornate glass bottle she was curiously drawn to on her trip into the city's marketplace turns out to have a for-real djinn (Idris Elba) inside of it. After Alithea persuades herself that this isn't one of the occasional halluinations she's been having (or are they hallucinations? I dunno, the film drops that thread like a hot rock), she settles in for a battle of wits, from her perspective; the djinn seems to rather think it's just a nice opportunity to have a conversation with a beautiful woman, which he admits very early on is a particular weakness of his. The point being, he needs her to make the usual three wishes, and she very flatly declares that of all people, a historian who specialises in mythology isn't about to set herself up for the kind of cunningly ironic fate that generally follows making wishes, and so they're at a standstill. To explain why he needs her to make those wishes, and give her some insights into how to make good ones, the djinn tells the stories of the four times he's had to interact with the human world over the last three thousand years (he fudges and says it's three, since that's the magic number): first when he was betrayed by his lover, the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum); then when he was fuond in the 16th Century by Gülten (Ece Yüksel), a concubine in the palace of Suleiman I of the Ottoman Empire; third, how he wandered invisibly for the next hundred years, and how he eventually was released from the fate of being unable to communicate with the world, and finally, how he became the servant of Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar) a brilliant young woman in the 19th Century with whom he feel deeply in love, to his great misfortune. And at the end of it, he ends up in that hotel room with Alithea, and in fact she has been inspired to make a wish by all of those stories, having failed to learn from them after all.
And there's more to come after that, for Three Thousand Years of Longing is a story about storytelling, and part of its trick is that it's not a three-part tale about the life of a djinn, but a two-part tale about Alithea, in which the first part largely consists of her listening to the djinn's life story. It's not really very complicated at all, since it's basically just directly and even tritely copying the narrative structure of the 1001 Nights: a story starts, then it gets hooked on a "by the way..." digression that itself includes further digressions, but eventually it unwinds them all to get back to the initial layer where everything started. Only here the film has another layer it distracted us from noticing, and I can't really go into it without getting into spoilers, except to say that it was very honest the whole time about what I was watching, and I just wasn't really thinking about it at the time.
At any rate: a story about storytelling, good solid metanarrative stuff, of a kind that was extremely pervasive in the '90s, when Byatt wrote the original story. You can very much see how this must have all fitted together very neatly in that medium, but Three Thousand Years of Longing isn't just converting a short story to cinematic form (though it does admirably demonstrate how short stories can be more suitable for cinematic treatment than novels, with their tighter focus on a smaller range of ideas and characters). As written, this is positing quite a few different ideas for what storytelling "does". It's about myth, how cultures try to derive Grand Truths through narrative. It's about memoir, how individual humans (or djinn, in this case) try to arrange the random noise of a lifetime into a smooth narrative arc. It's about conversation, where we select the parts of ourselves we want to present to other people, perhaps including some we have fabricated. It's about the parts of ourselves we present to ourselves, and the pain it can cause when the Story Of Me that a person wishes to be the true story doesn't comfortably fit the actual facts of their existence. These are all literary thing.
Then there are the cinematic things. Storytelling can be about how production designer Roger Ford (who worked on the Miller-written and Miller-produced and by some accounts Miller-ghost-directed Babe, and on the official Miller film Babe: Pig in the City) and costume designer Kym Barrett (who has never worked with Miller, but has worked several times with the Wachowskis, including on Cloud Atlas, which is the specific movie I was thinking about the most while watching Three Thousand Years of Longing) have combined to create a sparse vision of Consantinople/Istanbul across the centuries that never feels like the stuff of an illustrated book of fairy tales, but also doesn't feel like a fully-realised world; it feels almost like the world's largest and most lavish black box theater, where the only parts of the set that exist are the parts we need for the story to take place in, and those parts are given impeccable physical presence (more of it the closer we get to the present day), even as they feel very deliberately limited.
Storytelling can also be about how Margaret Sixel, Miller's invaluable editor and wife, bleeds scenes into each other using lots of showy digital gimcracks, blurring the "A to B to C" flow of the stories in favor of something that feels more like scenes spilling out over each other, and the framework of Alithea and the djinn getting tangled up with the stories he's telling. It can be about the marked contrast of the dimly-lit and lavishly colored tales, and the bright, soft, white hotel room where Elba and Swinton sit in fluffy white robes. It can be about Elba and Swinton themselves, two of the most reliable actors presently working in the English language, who can color in the details of their characters that script implies, or leaves as suggestive ellipses, just through things like the speed with which they react to each other's questions.
In short: this is as much a story about the form of storytelling as the content of storytelling, and who better than an indulgent, gaudy stylist like Miller to give us a whole bunch of form for form's sake? Three Thousand Years of Longing has made a remarkable transition from a word-driven narrative to an image-and-montage-driven narrative; rather, I should say, it is both, simultaneously, for its entire running time.
And somewhere along there, it plays the final trick: this isn't actually a story about storytelling at all. It's about the feelings that stories give us, and how those feelings, when put in the hands of a really gifted storyteller, can become entirely real, despite being born out of fiction. It's in the eye of the beholder whether Miller and company quite get us there - I will honestly say that I think the most overtly emotional material in the final act tends to feel a little bit tacked-on, and there's a very big gap in Alithea-as-written where she's meant to have undergone a profound emotional transformation, and Swinton alone can't quite make that leap happen. But I appreciate the enormous, fearlessly romantic swing the film takes, and the lack of embarrassment everybody involved seems to have felt in making something so goofy and earnest and fully committed to whatever it's doing in whatever moment it's doing it. I don't know if Three Thousand Years of Longing is a great film, but it's great cinema, and that is totally enough for me.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
And if that turns out to be the case, that's just fabulous, and I hope more studios line up to set money on fire on his behalf (our current subject, for example, is on track to lose a good three-quarters of its $60 million production budget). Three Thousand Years of Longing has good things about it, and it has bad things about it, but there's no mistaking this as any kind of compromised vision; it is a film that is fully intoxicated by itself and deeply inspired to be the most version of itself it knows how to be, given a finite budget and a production that had to be massively reduced in ambition once pandemic travel restrictions started showing up in 2020 (it was entirely shot in Australia, despite taking place entirely in Turkey and England).
The script was adapted by Miller & Augusta Gore from a short story by A.S. Byatt that I have unfortunately not read, though the bones of it certainly have the unmissable feel of literary fiction. Sometime around now (there are people wearing masks, but nothing seems to be happening over Zoom), Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is a literary scholar giving a conference presentation in Istanbul, on the theme of mythology and its function in contemporary society (you will be shocked - shocked! - to know that comic book superheroes are involved). Back in her hotel room, she's about to get a crash course in the practical application of her ideas, when the ornate glass bottle she was curiously drawn to on her trip into the city's marketplace turns out to have a for-real djinn (Idris Elba) inside of it. After Alithea persuades herself that this isn't one of the occasional halluinations she's been having (or are they hallucinations? I dunno, the film drops that thread like a hot rock), she settles in for a battle of wits, from her perspective; the djinn seems to rather think it's just a nice opportunity to have a conversation with a beautiful woman, which he admits very early on is a particular weakness of his. The point being, he needs her to make the usual three wishes, and she very flatly declares that of all people, a historian who specialises in mythology isn't about to set herself up for the kind of cunningly ironic fate that generally follows making wishes, and so they're at a standstill. To explain why he needs her to make those wishes, and give her some insights into how to make good ones, the djinn tells the stories of the four times he's had to interact with the human world over the last three thousand years (he fudges and says it's three, since that's the magic number): first when he was betrayed by his lover, the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum); then when he was fuond in the 16th Century by Gülten (Ece Yüksel), a concubine in the palace of Suleiman I of the Ottoman Empire; third, how he wandered invisibly for the next hundred years, and how he eventually was released from the fate of being unable to communicate with the world, and finally, how he became the servant of Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar) a brilliant young woman in the 19th Century with whom he feel deeply in love, to his great misfortune. And at the end of it, he ends up in that hotel room with Alithea, and in fact she has been inspired to make a wish by all of those stories, having failed to learn from them after all.
And there's more to come after that, for Three Thousand Years of Longing is a story about storytelling, and part of its trick is that it's not a three-part tale about the life of a djinn, but a two-part tale about Alithea, in which the first part largely consists of her listening to the djinn's life story. It's not really very complicated at all, since it's basically just directly and even tritely copying the narrative structure of the 1001 Nights: a story starts, then it gets hooked on a "by the way..." digression that itself includes further digressions, but eventually it unwinds them all to get back to the initial layer where everything started. Only here the film has another layer it distracted us from noticing, and I can't really go into it without getting into spoilers, except to say that it was very honest the whole time about what I was watching, and I just wasn't really thinking about it at the time.
At any rate: a story about storytelling, good solid metanarrative stuff, of a kind that was extremely pervasive in the '90s, when Byatt wrote the original story. You can very much see how this must have all fitted together very neatly in that medium, but Three Thousand Years of Longing isn't just converting a short story to cinematic form (though it does admirably demonstrate how short stories can be more suitable for cinematic treatment than novels, with their tighter focus on a smaller range of ideas and characters). As written, this is positing quite a few different ideas for what storytelling "does". It's about myth, how cultures try to derive Grand Truths through narrative. It's about memoir, how individual humans (or djinn, in this case) try to arrange the random noise of a lifetime into a smooth narrative arc. It's about conversation, where we select the parts of ourselves we want to present to other people, perhaps including some we have fabricated. It's about the parts of ourselves we present to ourselves, and the pain it can cause when the Story Of Me that a person wishes to be the true story doesn't comfortably fit the actual facts of their existence. These are all literary thing.
Then there are the cinematic things. Storytelling can be about how production designer Roger Ford (who worked on the Miller-written and Miller-produced and by some accounts Miller-ghost-directed Babe, and on the official Miller film Babe: Pig in the City) and costume designer Kym Barrett (who has never worked with Miller, but has worked several times with the Wachowskis, including on Cloud Atlas, which is the specific movie I was thinking about the most while watching Three Thousand Years of Longing) have combined to create a sparse vision of Consantinople/Istanbul across the centuries that never feels like the stuff of an illustrated book of fairy tales, but also doesn't feel like a fully-realised world; it feels almost like the world's largest and most lavish black box theater, where the only parts of the set that exist are the parts we need for the story to take place in, and those parts are given impeccable physical presence (more of it the closer we get to the present day), even as they feel very deliberately limited.
Storytelling can also be about how Margaret Sixel, Miller's invaluable editor and wife, bleeds scenes into each other using lots of showy digital gimcracks, blurring the "A to B to C" flow of the stories in favor of something that feels more like scenes spilling out over each other, and the framework of Alithea and the djinn getting tangled up with the stories he's telling. It can be about the marked contrast of the dimly-lit and lavishly colored tales, and the bright, soft, white hotel room where Elba and Swinton sit in fluffy white robes. It can be about Elba and Swinton themselves, two of the most reliable actors presently working in the English language, who can color in the details of their characters that script implies, or leaves as suggestive ellipses, just through things like the speed with which they react to each other's questions.
In short: this is as much a story about the form of storytelling as the content of storytelling, and who better than an indulgent, gaudy stylist like Miller to give us a whole bunch of form for form's sake? Three Thousand Years of Longing has made a remarkable transition from a word-driven narrative to an image-and-montage-driven narrative; rather, I should say, it is both, simultaneously, for its entire running time.
And somewhere along there, it plays the final trick: this isn't actually a story about storytelling at all. It's about the feelings that stories give us, and how those feelings, when put in the hands of a really gifted storyteller, can become entirely real, despite being born out of fiction. It's in the eye of the beholder whether Miller and company quite get us there - I will honestly say that I think the most overtly emotional material in the final act tends to feel a little bit tacked-on, and there's a very big gap in Alithea-as-written where she's meant to have undergone a profound emotional transformation, and Swinton alone can't quite make that leap happen. But I appreciate the enormous, fearlessly romantic swing the film takes, and the lack of embarrassment everybody involved seems to have felt in making something so goofy and earnest and fully committed to whatever it's doing in whatever moment it's doing it. I don't know if Three Thousand Years of Longing is a great film, but it's great cinema, and that is totally enough for me.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
