Movie Details
Movie: Three Thousand Years of Longing(2022)
Director: George Miller
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba and Erdil Yasaroglu
Genres: Fantasy/Romance
Release date: September 1, 2022
IMDB Rating: 6.7/10
Languages: Turkish, English, Greek, German, and French
Duration: 1h 48m
Trailer
Synopsis
A six-minute standing ovation, slightly cold critics, and a naked activist fighting against sexual violence by Russian soldiers in Ukraine. So the premiere of George Miller’s new film at the Cannes Festival brought only vague signals about what the film could be. At the last minute, however, the wild fantasy romance, whose trailer confused most viewers made it to the Karlovy Vary Film Festival where festival-goers could take a picture for themselves.
In the beginning, we meet the isolated academic Alithea (Tilda Swinton), who is seemingly satisfied with her life, but does not recognize the flip side of her independence and loneliness that changes when at a conference in Istanbul, she comes across a bottle that isn’t just a cheesy reminder. It is home to a massive djinn with the face (and partly the body) of Idris Elba, who has been seeking freedom from his destiny to fulfill three wishes for every person for some time.
Miller was shocked seven years ago thanks to the stylish recreate of not only the Mad Max franchise but to a large extent the entire action genre. Walk-over kinetic action in a troubled emotionally intoxicating presentation balanced the absence of a supporting original story to the extent that the film was placed not only among the best works of the given year but even of the entire decade. Such a future of Miller’s novel cannot be predicted. Although his ability to shoot a stylish scene and use rhythmic editing to convey enough information in a short time is shown in selected places after watching the entire film, the expression remains on one’s face.
While most people would be completely horrified by the appearance of a massive and supernatural being, Miller and his daughter Augusta Gore’s screenplay takes advantage of the fact that his heroine is highly intelligent and highly educated in her subject matter – she specializes in narratology and she basically knows model stories across civilizations and can thus freely comment on the jinn’s narrative. The fact that it is named after the ancient goddess of truth makes this desire to get to the heart of the problem even stronger. But what’s the point when, after a moment of intellectual dialogue, the film slips into a fateful but surprisingly common romance.
But even before that, through the stories that the djinn has lived through time, he gets to several exotic places. Most of the episodes take place in the Ottoman Empire from the late Middle Ages to the present day, and there are obvious sources of inspiration from which the short stories were based. The novella Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye by the writer AS Byatt was based on the Tales of One Thousand and One Nights, Shakespeare’s plays, Chaucer’s short stories, or the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh.
The short stories presented in both the novel and the film adaptation are therefore full of references to these classics, and it would be appreciated that the knowledgeable viewer will therefore find something to their liking – but the rapid pitching of this theme interrupted by returns to the framing story from the present does not allow any of them to experience and feel its victim steady by centuries. At the same time, several thoughts are not in vain, and perhaps thinking about whether we only exist when other people see us deserves more care. But he won’t get her.
The audience’s confusion is also amplified by details such as Elba’s acting – sometimes we have to sympathize with his difficult fate, and at other times his exalted playing with pointed ears is primarily meant to entertain. Furthermore, there are no clear rules defined around the djinn character, so we don’t know what the goal of his efforts should be or how it can be achieved. The shatter performance is also manifested in the ending, which is inadequately muted about the previous plot, and instead of the necessary deliverance, there is only a soothing conclusion. The film’s possible message about the importance of storytelling is sympathetically humanistic, but it doesn’t improve the impression of the entire work very much.
As with Mad Max: Fury Road, Miller was able to talk Oscar-winning cinematographer John Seale into taking the Steadicam off the nail and filming one more time. The result is not as opulent as in the case of Mad Max, but even the first-hand narrated episodes from history look beautiful and remind, for example, of Terry Gilliam’s fantastic trips at the head of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen or The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. In general, several other names also creep into the mind – for example, Darren Aronofsky or Tarsem Singh, whose works such as The Fall are close to Miller’s novel in terms of swollen, all-enclose themes and engaging audiovisual qualities. However, both mentioned films were clearer and more complete in their message (and the way they got there).
The resulting evaluation thus greatly depends on your approach to gigantic film projects. Miller has fulfilled his dream and completed a long-delayed project, which he certainly wishes for. He wanted to tell him a lot of things, especially about the importance of love as a principle that rises above time and space and gives meaning to life despite the many major or minor disasters that can befall a person. Which is all very nice, but the film as a whole doesn’t work very well and the partial qualities are all too easily forgotten. We can only hope that Miller manages to keep the scale within reasonable limits in the upcoming Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
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