Photo © United Artists
Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in 'Three Thousand Years of Longing'
Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in 'Three Thousand Years of Longing'
Wandering through Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, visiting academic Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) randomly purchases a blue glass bottle with white spirals. “Whatever it is, I’m sure it has an interesting story,” she remarks. Alithea can’t begin to imagine the stories that will soon emerge from it.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is a surprisingly enchanting take on the Arabian Nights—those thousand and one stories that originated in the medieval Near East and captivated audiences with tales of Ali Baba, Sinbad and the djinn in a jar—that genie who emerges from a bottle offering to grant three wishes. Moviemakers have been drawn to the Arabian Nights since the early days of cinema. With flying carpets and sorcery, silent films such as Thief of Bagdad (1924) reveled in rendering magic through special effects on celluloid.
In the century since carpets first took flight on film, it’s gotten harder to astonish audiences—even when Idris Elba pours from Alithea’s bottle in a corkscrewing fury of magenta and burgundy smoke. “I’m going to close my eyes and count to three,” she says, wishing him away. But he’s not leaving her hotel room, this bigger than life entity with pointy ears (easily concealed under a hoodie when outdoors). He never introduces himself by name, he’s just Djinn, and tells Alithea stories that unfold in elaborate computer-generated flashbacks set in ancient Africa and Constantinople under the Turks.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is based on a short story by British writer A.S. Byatt, “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.” As adapted by writer-director George Miller (whose diverse resume includes Mad Max, Babe and The Witches of Eastwick) with his daughter Augusta Gore, the story concerns the power and perils of storytelling, a subject Alithea knows well, at least in the abstract.
As a professor working at the junction where comp lit meets comp myth, she understands that stories are the way humans make reality coherent. In her Istanbul guest lecture, she declares that mythology was what we knew “back then”—primeval creation stories have been supplanted by the narratives of science. And yet, on her trip to Turkey, Alithea keeps glimpsing creatures whose existence she has reduced to metaphors, even before Djinn pops from the bottle.
So, is Djinn an unreliable narrator when he explains that Solomon confined him to a bottle in rivalry over the hand of the Queen of Sheba? What’s more central to Three Thousand Years is the understanding that develops between between Alithea, played with a nervous cerebral twitch by Swinton, and Elba’s urbane, richly soulful Djinn. Worried over unintended consequences, she’s reluctant to ask him to grant any wish. “What is your heart’s desire?” he demands. She has no answer. Her heart has atrophied from years of unsociable solitude.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is also about the stories we avoid telling ourselves and how love is a narrative, perhaps a fairytale, not comprehensible through reason or analysis. By the end, it also wonders whether it’s become more difficult to tell coherent stories in an increasingly cacophonous, incoherent world.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is screening at the Downer, Oriental, Marcus South Shore, Marcus Ridge and Marcus Majestic theaters.
