Film review: Three Thousand Years of Longing an enchanting, enthralling epic

Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in Three Thousand Years of Longing. Photo / Supplied

Three Thousand Years of Longing (108 mins) (R) In cinemas now
Directed by George Miller
Reviewed by Jen Shieff

George Miller, the director and co-writer of Three Thousand Years of Longing was a practising physician until he began producing movies, including two in the Mad Max stable (1985 and 2015, with another recently announced), Lorenzo's Oil (1992), Babe (1998) and Happy Feet (2006 and 2011). He's versatile to say the least, and it's a good thing he's now turned to directing.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is an enchanting, enthralling epic, fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable. Miller's starting point was A.S. Byatt's novella, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, about a djinn with the ability to grant wishes. He's not one of those mean-spirited djinns, hell-bent on schadenfreude, hoping your wishes backfire, waiting to enjoy your misfortune. On the contrary, this djinn genuinely wants to grant your heart's desire.

Academic narratologist, an expert in the structure of narratives, Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) goes from her home in England to Istanbul as a keynote speaker at a conference. Even before she gets to her hotel, weird things start happening to her, but it's in her hotel room that she experiences the weirdest one of all. To her amazement, she releases a djinn (Idris Elba) from a grubby bottle she's bought in a bazaar. His vapour swirls, filling the room, until organic particles magically shape him into a magnificent, oversized human-looking being, with elf's ears.

Alithea takes an understandably long time to accept that the djinn is not just another trickster genie. Make a wish, he urges her. She wants for nothing, she tells him, but she must make a wish, he begs her, otherwise he's doomed to another thousand years stuck in a bottle. That's happened to him twice before, twice too often.

Like Scheherazade, stories are all the djinn has to save himself from his doom. To persuade her to ask him for something that really matters to her, he must tell Alithea gripping stories about love, virtue, pain, depravity, greed, jealousy, forgiveness and loyalty. The three stories he tells sparkle with narrative inventiveness, but still she doesn't want anything.

As desperation sets in for the djinn, Alithea begins to rise to his bait. Could the djinn be right? Should she give up her life of reason and science to risk going along the rocky road of a real relationship?

Unwittingly, the narratologist has become the central player in her own story. Alithea becomes so frustrated by the djinn and his stories that her wish nearly becomes, "I wish I'd never met you", but then the turning point comes. All at once, she realises she's lonely and knows what her heart desires. She makes her wish and in so doing, she escapes predictability and the djinn escapes his dreaded bottle.

Gorgeously filmed, Three Thousand Years of Longing is fantastic escapist entertainment with wonderful characters and an excellent script.

Highly recommended.

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The first person to bring an image or hardcopy of this review to Starlight Cinema Taupo qualifies for a free ticket to Three Thousand Years of Longing.