From sheepherding pigs and tap-dancing penguins to post-apocalyptic road warriors, Australian filmmaker George Miller has long imbued his work with fantastical elements. With his recent return to the Max Mad franchise in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and upcoming projects like Mad Max: The Wasteland and Furiosa, Miller’s decade-spanning roots in the action genre continues. Nevertheless, this beloved Aussie has also shown a range of interest in different genres throughout his career with drama, comedy-adventure, and documentary works. And while Mad Max remains at the forefront of his next set of films, Miller has recently departed from his iconic franchise with the fantastically dreamy and strangely sincere Three Thousand Years of Longing.
Based on early trailers for the film, one might expect Three Thousand Years to be a dynamic, kitschy cinema trip, much like the recent multiverse narratives in the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) or Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), but this movie is something more unassuming. Against my own preconceptions, I found Three Thousand Years to be curiously grounded and sentimental in its tone and narrative. Despite its expansive storytelling, the plot remains distinct and the emotional core ever-present. For a film that I had expected to be garish, yet fun, Three Thousand Years bears the ambitious emotional and philosophical depths of a feature like Everything Everywhere All at Once, but it does so more discreetly. In fact, the quieter moments of conversation between Tilda Swinton’s Alithea and Idris Elba’s Djinn are some of the film’s best. These conversations and the characters’ stories are the key ingredients of the film and part of what makes this odd concoction of cinematic materials so great.
Much of the narrative revolves around The Djinn’s backstory and his conversations with Alithea in her “Agatha Christie room.” Alithea first arrives in Istanbul to give an academic lecture, and her hallucinatory encounters with different strange apparitions, which she dismisses as her lucid imagination, eventually lead her to the city bazaar. She, of course, is drawn to a magic bottle which she takes back to her hotel suite. While cleaning the relic with an electric toothbrush, an enormous, fiery, dusty Djinn appears and proves his mythic realness to an initially disbelieving Alithea. Strangely, her reaction is rather mild, and she seems more fascinated with his stories and the pretense of a “three magic wishes” narrative, than she is with the fact that a giant genie has manifested in her presence. As Alithea and the Djinn exchange stories and perspectives throughout the narrative, they grow more comfortable and trusting of one another. Eventually, Alithea’s love for stories grows into a love for him and a desire to be loved, as the Djinn details in his historical tales. Miller challenges his audience’s presumptions about this very type of fantastical narrative by withholding Alithea’s actual wishes until over halfway through the film. It is at this midpoint that Three Thousand Years sheds its longer flashback sequences to focus on the intimacies of the two leads and the challenges that the Djinn faces in the modern world.
While the plot is, at times, certainly bizarre, it falls together rather neatly in the end. This comes as little surprise, given Miller’s candid enthusiasm for storytelling. With a professed love for storytelling, in Three Thousand Years he proves his sentiments with a bold film that dares to relish in the contemplative moments, despite the larger scope of the narrative. Even the characters themselves bask in the love of stories: the Djinn has an immortal life full of tragic and fantastical tales, while Alithea is a uni narratologist. Their ruminative/mythical and intellectual/shrewd differences in personalities blend so well that the initial strangeness of their relationship grows into something to admire. As a storyteller crafting a love letter to stories themselves, Miller creates a rich aesthetic experience in his genuine attitudes toward authorship, and the peculiarities of the film channel into an odd yet earnest romance that stands above any cloying or tawdry sentimentality. Three Thousand Years is able to indulge the fantasy genre without ever being truly ridiculous, and its pathos is always apparent. While the film received a standing ovation at its premiere in Cannes, general reception has been mixed so far, as the film is more subversive in its narrative than its marketing led audiences to believe. Yet, I believe the film will be critically regarded in years to come — hopefully, less than 3,000.
There is also much to love in the techniques and characterizations in Three Thousand Years. The film showcases epic, historical flashbacks in its first half, detailing the Djinn’s encounters with the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum) and King Solomon (Nicolas Mouawad), the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, and his second love Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar), an intellectual slave who embodies a feminine precursor to Leonardo da Vinci. What is most impressive about these characters is Miller’s multi-ethnic casting of mostly Turkish and African actors and his use of historical, endemic languages, which lend a greater sense of authenticity to the characters. The script is exquisite, especially in the voiceovers and monologues of Swinton and Elba — which, of course, draws direct inspiration from writer A.S. Byatt’s short story collection “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.” There is much to admire about the creative cinematography and editing too, whether it be the delightful match cuts of Alithea arriving at the airport in Istanbul, the pulsing visual effects filters of the Djinn’s point of view, or Alithea’s stupefied encounters with hallucinogenic figures in the opening section of the film. As he has proven in the animated ventures of the Babe and Happy Feet series, Miller is able to showcase his technical know-how while still projecting an emotional pathos toward the audience. While quite askew from his past work, in Three Thousand Years Miller has shown himself to be a confident filmmaker, experimenting and evolving in his art with much appreciation.
Since stories are at the forefront of the film in its plot, sentiments, and source material, Miller’s maxim seems to be that it’s all for the love of stories. While Three Thousand Years is loosely adapted from the title tale of Byatt’s short story collection, Miller goes out on his own here by recasting Byatt’s short into a wild cinematic meditation on love, waiting, wishing, and listening. The work is certainly a spectacle, but its visual cinematic quality augments the story rather than overwhelms it. Miller’s work here truly surprised me and overturned my expectations, and I am all the more pleased for it. The film does something exceptional in that its themes, characters, and histories are at once vast and intimate. As an ode to stories and storytelling, Three Thousand Years of Longing is a marvelous tale in and of itself. It’s probably Miller’s most ambitious, thoughtful, and best work to date. Most importantly, it reminds us of the powerful presence and imaginative scope of storytelling.
