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Early in Three Thousand Years of Longing, Alithea (Tilda Swinton) declares to a crowd that stories are nothing but metaphors. Her audience accepts this pronouncement quietly—with the exception of a bearded, white-robed apparition in the front row. “Lies!” he shouts.
The bellower is in sympathy with the film’s director, George Miller (Mad Max, Babe: Pig in the City). Miller is a master of metaphors, but his work is built on the belief that a story must be more than a symbol. For him, it is not enough for art to only represent a thing. It must be a thing, and preferably a beautiful and bracing one.
Based on A.S. Byatt’s short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” and written by Miller and Augusta Gore, Three Thousand Years of Longing doesn’t quite fulfill that ideal. Miller’s phantasmagorical visuals are as beguiling as ever, but a frustrating, retrograde conclusion may leave some moviegoers doubting his feminist bona fides. Alithea certainly would.
As a narratologist (which is a real job!), Alithea decodes common elements of stories across cultures. She’s a modern Joseph Campbell, but without his rambling, ruminative style. Even when she acknowledges the DC Comics pantheon in a presentation on myth, she refuses to be bogged down in superhero arcana (incidentally, Miller almost made a Justice League film).
Alithea becomes an unlikely companion to the Djinn (Idris Elba), a towering, chatty genie who has spent several millennia imprisoned in a brass bottle. Upon appearing in Alithea’s hotel room in Istanbul, he asks her to help him gain his freedom by making three wishes, but he’s begging the wrong gal.
“There’s no story about wishing that is not a cautionary tale,” Alithea claims. Implicit in her words is a challenge: Can the Djinn (and the movie) convince Alithea to fall for the seductive prospect of dreams made real?
Alithea spends most of Three Thousand Years of Longing listening while the Djinn reveals his past lives, which are envisioned in hallucinatory flashbacks. With their shadowy palaces, colored smoke and smoldering desires, his stories have a maximalist allure, but his most intimate tale—about Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar), the restless wife of an elderly merchant—is his best.
Zefir, a scientific genius who dreams of human flight, wishes for nearly limitless knowledge. Smitten, the Djinn obliges, but there’s a cost: Zefir feels suffocated by his adoration. Love and sex, it turns out, aren’t always as soul-enriching as intelligence.
There’s a spiritual kinship between Zefir and Alithea, who informs the Djinn that she doesn’t regret being single and childless. We learn that her ex-husband had an affair, but she recounts the betrayal in a brisk, businesslike manner. She may be isolated, but she says she’s content.
The problem is that Three Thousand Years of Longing doesn’t believe Alithea. Despite starting out as a seemingly radical fairy tale about the difference between loneliness and aloneness, the film abruptly reduces her to a mopey spinster at the end of the second act, insisting that she wanted to be wooed by the hunky genie all along.
It’s enough to make you wonder what happened to Miller. His last film, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), was a cornucopia of cinematic joys, but none could compete with the defiant spectacle of women of all ages banding together to conquer a bloated patriarch.
That’s why it’s so sobering that Three Thousand Years of Longing falls back on one of the most toxic of tropes: the woman whose salvation lies in coupledom. It’s yet another instance of what Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (1998) called “ferocious pairing off,” an enduring false god that damages people of all gender identities.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is at its most persuasive when it recognizes that the Djinn’s power doesn’t come from wishes—it comes from being the one who grants them. That’s why he looks so vexed when Alithea sly wishes for a sip of tea, something she’s thoroughly capable of obtaining on her own.
Miller seems to think Alithea is being glib—that tea is code for some secret yearning. But Swinton, with all her imperious poise, convinces you that her character just wants a cuppa.
SEE IT: Three Thousand Years of Longing opens Thursday, Aug. 25, at Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cinema 2, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Progress Ridge, Tigard and Vancouver Plaza.