Australian George Miller is best known for the “Mad Max” series, but this time he made a complete turn by filming a fairy-tale romantic fantasy that is a kind of variation on the theme of the Arab myth about the genie in the bottle. Fairytales and fantasies are actually no stranger to Miller, since he also shot films such as “The Witches of Eastwick”, “Babe the Piglet”, and he won the only Oscar for the animated film “Happy Feet”. However, “Three Thousand Years of Longing” may at first appear to be a typical fairy tale, fantasy, but in fact it is a subversive romance about longing, loneliness, love and self-deception.
Visually it looks sumptuous, colorful, vividly colored, especially in the parts when the ghost or djinn embodied by Idriss Elba remembers his previous escapes from the captivity of the bottle. Djinn will be called in Istanbul by a lonely scientist who seems to be used to a solitary life, but we will understand that she actually longs for love, tenderness and everything that goes with it. The British woman Alithea (Tilda Swinton) calls her field of study narratology and she studies the need of people throughout history to supplement what they cannot understand with stories, myths, and deities. Today, when science has managed to explain practically all mysteries, the need for stories almost disappears, and she left for a lecture in Istanbul.
Alithea is one of those people who seem to have come to terms with a solitary life and as if she managed to convince herself that this is the best and safest way for her. She seems cold, distant, as if she has created an armor around herself and doesn’t let anyone get close to her, but that will change when she buys an antique bottle, a vase, whatever in one of Istanbul’s small shops, and the next morning in her hotel room a djinn calls her to the room, who will tell her his life story, which has been going on for three thousand years. Like any genie in a bottle, the djinn will offer Alithea the fulfillment of her wishes, but it will not be so easy because the calculating and cautious scientist knows that nothing is free and that every wish must be paid for in some way.
Instead of the classic fulfillment of wishes, the meeting between the djinn and Alithea will turn into a kind of investigation, and the scientist will be interested in how he ended up in the bottle in the first place and what is his fate. And through the castle of the mythical Queen Sheba, through the court of Turkish sultans interrupted by thousands of years of waiting and longing in a bottle, he will tell her his story, and we will understand that every time he was released and returned to the bottle, the woman he fell in love with was to blame. Visually, it seemed a bit Gilliam-like to me, especially the parts where the djinn returns to history and brings fairy tales that are often not particularly romantic, but are therefore unexpectedly violent and brutal, which is what history was after all.
So even though science has largely succeeded in eradicating the need for mythology and stories, watching “Three Thousand Years of Longing” one has to wonder what a man is without stories and what today’s society would look like if there weren’t all those powerful stories that filled the holes in knowledge and understanding. It was an extremely ambitious and expensive film that didn’t even come close to justifying the investment, and even in the late seventies Miller shows that he is an exceptional director. Just like many of his colleagues at that late age, he seems to have a need in his works to try to find answers to the questions of what it means to be human at all, and he finely disguised all this in a luxurious and fluffy fairy tale.