Film

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Three Thousand Years of Longing

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If it were possible to take a millennia of human suffering and emotion, bottle it up, and then hold its secrets so tightly they could only be revealed under impossible and fantastic circumstances, then you just might have the basic building blocks of Three Thousand Years of Longing. This is an extraordinarily sophisticated fairy tale embedded within a story that first breaks, and then finally makes the case for, the singularity of love itself. To understand how Australian director and co-writer George Miller of Mad Max fame does this, I recommend you seek the film out on the biggest screen you can find and allow the simple, patient, and completely believable performances from Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba to enchant and overtake you. Miller’s incredible world—a place that treats magic and realism as equals—is unique from the moment we enter it. The famous MGM lion roars at us in strange silence, and then it’s only moments before the plot takes a spiritual and fantastical turn which lasts for a spellbinding and effortless 1 hour and 48 minutes.

The plot within a plot is hosted mainly from a dreamy Istanbul hotel room and resembles a two-hander play. The film focused almost exclusively on the dynamic duo of Swinton as Dr. Alithea Binnie, an academic narratologist scholar obsessed with the history of human stories, and her unexpected brush with Elba as Djinn, a true kind of “genie in a bottle” whose freedom and existence now depends entirely on her and the fulfillment of her three wishes.

The two are forced together to work out the chess game and rules of engagement, which requires Alithea to confront what her heart most desires and whether or not she can trust Djinn, especially since she knows from her studies that spirits can bend wishes to their own needs.

To share too much more would be a betrayal of the joy of allowing you to discover the rest yourself. And what would be the point? This is a truly romantic movie where the more reason you apply to what you think is true, the more you doubt yourself. Swinton enters this role already established as one of the most daring and provocative actors working today, but in Three Thousand Years of Longing, she displays yet again that we should never underestimate her ability to transform herself. In portraying the calm introvert who escapes into stories to understand emotions she’s never experienced herself, Swinton gives us a delicate arc that doesn’t end until the wholly satisfying and unexpected ending. Elba brings the opposite tension in mesmerizing Alithea (and us) with the power of his pain and the eternal longing to be free, a plague which requires him to study and manipulate mortals even as he seems sometimes resigned to the neverending pattern—a fatalist who isn’t overexaggerating. Elba’s deliberate, focused portrayal of Djinn is so believable that you feel the weight of a man who understands that he literally has all the time in the world to contemplate the unfathomable, or at least try. The fast-paced script is co-written by Miller and Augusta Gore and based on a novella, but Three Thousand Years of Longing, is as cinematic as it gets, with dazzling flashbacks and visuals that make you feel as if you’re dreaming while awake. Eastern and Western folklore and mythology come alive without caricature, more relatable and powerful than you ever thought imaginable. Wonderfully challenging and engaging, the film is filled with explorations of the biggest questions of our short-lived selfconsciousness: Do we exist if others don’t see us? Are stories the only language we have? And what is the purpose of this human heart that we all know and all feel? It’s a quilt of mysteries that at first seem too challenging to even understand, let alone solve, but the film finds a one-of-a-kind way. To put it simply: Joseph Campbell would have loved this.