A long-imprisoned djinn tells his centuries-old story to the lonely scholar who has woken him in Three Thousand Years of Longing, which closed out this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival after premiering out-of-competition at Cannes.
Directed by George Miller (Mad Max) and adapted from A.S. Byatt’s 1994 collection of short stories The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Three Thousand Years of Longing is filled with scenes of intense beauty and visual spectacle, but it ultimately fails to build to a satisfying whole.
The central story between the djinn and the scholar that serves as Three Thousand Years of Longing’s framing device should provide the film’s heart, but instead feels strangely aloof. This one is an ambitious but rare misfire for the director, who has produced and directed a number of other successes in-between his Mad Max films.
Three Thousand Years of Longing stars Tilda Swinton as Alithea Binnie, a London professor of narratology who attends a conference in Istanbul to give a presentation on ancient storytelling and the meaning behind fairy tales passed down through generations.
After the conference, Alithea comes across an ornate bottle while digging through the wares at an Istanbul antique shop, and no surprises: while cleaning the bottle in her hotel room, out pops an enormous Djinn (played by Idris Elba), who shrinks down to human size to give Alithea the good news.
Three wishes, please: anything her heart desires. But because Alithea is an expert in these kinds of matters, she’s astutely wary of the Djinn’s offer. And because we’ve heard a barroom joke and read a Monkeys’ Paw tale or two, we’re in on the be-careful-what-you-wish-for moral as well.
So instead of making a wish, Alithea inquires into the life of the Djinn and his titular Three Thousand Years of Longing. And this is where the film really soars: Elba’s Djinn regales Alithea with a One Thousand and One Nights-style collection of stories from his previous owners.
These smaller stories do contain that satisfying be-careful-what-you-wish-for twist, and here’s the kicker: because his previous owners each get some kind of comeuppance before they can make a third wish, the Djinn is forever imprisoned. He’s not a mischievous imp in these stories, but rather a tragic figure himself bound by genie laws.
Or so he says, anyway; it could all just be a potential attempt to persuade Alithea to make her damn wishes. But because Swinton’s character is already seeing things at the Istanbul conference before she comes across the Djinn and this could all be taking place in her mind, and we’re watching a movie about a genie and three wishes in the first place, it’s hard to muster much interest in relationship between Alithea and the Djinn. Even if the final act of Three Thousand Years of Longing attempts to persuade us otherwise.
Three Thousand Years of Longing may be a misfire, but it still retains plenty of interest. While the framing story is largely confined to an Istanbul hotel, the stories the Djinn tells are gorgeously recreated with vibrant sets and costume design and gorgeous cinematography from John Seale (Mad Max: Fury Road).
The individual storylines never seem to give us more than a few minutes with any character, but they’re so richly detailed and satisfying in their own right (one, which features a royal heir with a thing for large women, feels like it was ripped from a Jan Saudek painting) that they make Three Thousand Years of Longing worth catching even if the film as a whole leaves us wishing for more.
