"Three Thousand Years" is a Rarity

George Miller's long-awaited follow-up to "Mad Max: Fury Road," "Three Thousand Years of Longing," is the kind of movie that nobody makes anymore.  Well, it's a movie that nobody makes with this kind of budget and gives a wide release to, anyway.  It's a romance for one thing, starring two very good, mature actors, Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba.  It's also an orientalist fantasy patterned off the tropes of "One Thousand and One Nights," and those have been tricky to navigate in a modern context.  There's a self-awareness to the film's writing that makes the tales of exotic Djinn and sultans palatable, but some lingering concerns remain.  Still, I couldn't resist the spectacle that Miller and his team managed to orchestrate, or the breathlessly earnest tale of love and romance that accompanies it.   

Swinton stars as a British "narratologist," Alithea, a scholar of stories.  She comes to Istanbul for a conference, and acquires a bottle that happens to contain a Djinn, played by Elba.  Most of the film is simply the two of them sitting in Alithea's hotel room, discussing the Djinn's requisite offer of three wishes to Alithea, who doesn't want them.  The Djinn's freedom, however, requires the fulfillment of these wishes, which leads to him recounting his history as a Djinn in an attempt to persuade her, starting three thousand years ago when he was in love with the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagun).  His history also involves stories about Suleiman the Magnificent (Lachy Hulme), his sons, a slave girl named Gulten (Ece Yuksel), and a passionate scholar named Zefir (Burcu Golgedar).  The Djinn himself is sometimes an active participant, and sometimes only a passive observer.

These stories are familiar, about wishes and consequences, and the folly of human nature.  What's interesting is the framing of them, from the point of view of the wish-granting Djinn.  He is an immortal creature depicted as otherworldly and inhuman, but has very human appetites and weaknesses, especially when it comes to love.  Elba and Swinton have no trouble selling their unlikely characters, and are on roughly equal footing throughout the film.  I would have been happy with the film if it simply stayed with the two of them in the hotel room, "Leo Grande" style, debating the intricacies of making wishes and getting involved with the wrong people.  However, George Miller chooses to depict the stories with all the colorful fairy tale flourishes that he can fit onscreen.  As Elba narrates, Miller brings us into sumptuously constructed Middle Eastern fantasy worlds, full of exotic images of bygone kingdoms and empires.  The characters include shapeshifters, storytellers, giants, geniuses, and magicians.  It's not as bombastic as something like this summer's "Elvis," but I couldn't take my eyes off the screen.    

Fantasy media has gotten rather less fantastical over the last few years, with many of the big franchises being  very concerned with their own internal logic and echoing real world issues.  I appreciate that "Three Thousand Years" is not remotely interested in this.  It never explains why things happen, or how, but stays focused on telling entertaining stories and presenting interesting characters.  Because it's George Miller at the helm, these stories have some adult material, some dark humor, and quite a lot of violence.  There are some nods to the plight of women in these bygone and not-so-bygone patriarchal Middle-Eastern societies, particularly in the story of Zefir, the unhappy youngest wife of a rich Turkish merchant.  However, the movie isn't interested in really questioning these inequities in any depth.  Likewise, the Djinn never remarks on the fairness of being trapped in his bottle for thousands of years, or the logic of having to grant wishes in order to earn his freedom.  It's only at the end, when Alithea takes over the narrative, and we're only able to perceive the Djinn from her point of view, that the film seems to be prodding the viewer to be more critical of how the story is being constructed and presented.  

If you want to dig more into the themes, I'm sure that there are plenty of other little metatextual goodies in the film that I didn't spot.  However, what I ended up loving it for are its visual ambitions and cinematic adventurousness.  This is clearly a passion project for George Miller, full of wild concepts like King Solomon (Nicolas Mouawad) wooing Sheba with magical musical instruments that play themselves, or one of Suleiman's sons having a penchant for giantess concubines.  When the Djinn is first released, Alithea's first look at him is of his giant toes, intruding into her bathroom.  Miller does so many wonderful things with scale, and color, and motion in this film.  I'm so glad he got to make it, even though it was probably always doomed to be a bust at the box office.  There's a reason they don't make them like this anymore, and that's a terrible shame.  

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