Post by Dracula on Aug 30, 2022 20:41:08 GMT -5
Three Thousand Years of Longing(8/26/2022)
I didn’t expect much out of Mad Max: Fury Road, at least before the trailer dropped. That’s partly because I had come not to expect much out of director George Miller, who had spent the previous twenty years making nothing but four children’s movies, one of which he didn’t even direct. But Mad Max: Fury Road obliterated any expectations and became one of the most universally acclaimed films of the 2010s and at the age of seventy George Miller was being declared a visionary in a way he widely hadn’t been when he was making the previous Mad Max films and certainly not when he was making Hollywood oddities like The Witches of Eastwick. Next thing you know Miller is getting Oscar nominations and heading up major festival juries Cannes and all eyes are on what he’s going to do next. The path of least resistance for Miller probably would have been to rush Max Max 5 into production but before doing that he seems to have decided the time was right to do a “one of me” via his latest film, a magical realist fantasy film called Three Thousand Years of Longing.
Miller’s new film begins with its protagonist, Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), on a plane from the United Kingdom to Turkey where she intends to take part in a lecture on the power of mythology through the ages which is interrupted when she sees these strange ghostly visions. Later that day she buys a little glass bottle at a flea market as a souvenir and the next morning she tries opening it only for it to shatter and swirling magical sands seep out of it and materialize into a humanoid form of a Djinn (Idris Elba) a mythological creature also known as a genie. In typical genie fashion, the Djinn tells her she’s entitled to three wishes with many of the classic rules like “no wishing for other wishes” and the like. Alithea, who is largely content with her life and weary of the old stories of genie’s granting wishes that turn into monkey’s paw curses, is hesitant to request anything. Instead the two strike up a conversation and the Djinn begins recounting his own personal history of interacting with humans starting with his interactions with the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum) up to the 1800s, albeit with some centuries lost stuck in his bottle.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is based on a short story by A. S. Byatt called "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" and it will probably not be too surprising to viewers that this comes from literary origins because there are ideas and structural elements to it that are a lot more trendy in novels than they are in movies. The film’s flashback structure, older characters, and general magical realist trappings are the kind of ideas that tend to come to authors rather than filmmakers but George Miller does a pretty damn admirable job of trying to translate them. The film’s highlights are obviously the flashbacks to the Djinn’s life, which tend to look at aspects of mythology and historical settings that have not been very widely used by Hollywood in the recent past (not a lot of Ottoman Empire movies). These flashbacks are a bit more mythic than they are truly historical, it’s not 300 levels of stylization but they might not be out of place in a Tarsem movie or something. I don’t want to give too much away but each story kind of works as its own thing while also painting the picture of the Djinn’s larger arc and they also sort of tell traditional stories about the dangers of not wishing carefully while also not making the Djinn feel malevolent.
Where the movie falls off a bit is in the film’s third act, which I don’t want to give away too much about even though it doesn’t exactly have some wildly unexpected twist or anything like that. In short, once we finally finish all of the Djinn’s flashbacks and get up to date the film has to make a tricky pivot into “the present” and I’m not sure it finds as compelling a direction to take things at this point as what came before either visually or narratively. But’s that’s not to say the movie totally falls on its face either and there are aspects of where it goes during that back third that I do respect quite a bit. Beyond that your mileage with this movie will probably depend on your expectations. There are bits here that live up to the “visionary” branding that has been attached to George Miller as of late, but it’s no Mad Max: Fury Road (nor should it be) and I wouldn’t say it’s some king of visual game changer or anything. Context may matter a lot with how you react to the film. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to respectful but not entirely enthused reviews and maybe opening amidst the best of world cinema didn’t necessarily do the film any favors. The August of 2022, in the middle of one of the longer dry spells of new films of any cultural interest we’ve had in a while, this is going to feel much more welcomed by critics but even in that context I don’t know that this is going to set the world on fire. Despite that I can easily see this becoming quite the cult film at some point in the future and you’re going to hear a lot of people mentioning it as a bit of a gem.
**** out of Five
I didn’t expect much out of Mad Max: Fury Road, at least before the trailer dropped. That’s partly because I had come not to expect much out of director George Miller, who had spent the previous twenty years making nothing but four children’s movies, one of which he didn’t even direct. But Mad Max: Fury Road obliterated any expectations and became one of the most universally acclaimed films of the 2010s and at the age of seventy George Miller was being declared a visionary in a way he widely hadn’t been when he was making the previous Mad Max films and certainly not when he was making Hollywood oddities like The Witches of Eastwick. Next thing you know Miller is getting Oscar nominations and heading up major festival juries Cannes and all eyes are on what he’s going to do next. The path of least resistance for Miller probably would have been to rush Max Max 5 into production but before doing that he seems to have decided the time was right to do a “one of me” via his latest film, a magical realist fantasy film called Three Thousand Years of Longing.
Miller’s new film begins with its protagonist, Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), on a plane from the United Kingdom to Turkey where she intends to take part in a lecture on the power of mythology through the ages which is interrupted when she sees these strange ghostly visions. Later that day she buys a little glass bottle at a flea market as a souvenir and the next morning she tries opening it only for it to shatter and swirling magical sands seep out of it and materialize into a humanoid form of a Djinn (Idris Elba) a mythological creature also known as a genie. In typical genie fashion, the Djinn tells her she’s entitled to three wishes with many of the classic rules like “no wishing for other wishes” and the like. Alithea, who is largely content with her life and weary of the old stories of genie’s granting wishes that turn into monkey’s paw curses, is hesitant to request anything. Instead the two strike up a conversation and the Djinn begins recounting his own personal history of interacting with humans starting with his interactions with the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum) up to the 1800s, albeit with some centuries lost stuck in his bottle.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is based on a short story by A. S. Byatt called "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" and it will probably not be too surprising to viewers that this comes from literary origins because there are ideas and structural elements to it that are a lot more trendy in novels than they are in movies. The film’s flashback structure, older characters, and general magical realist trappings are the kind of ideas that tend to come to authors rather than filmmakers but George Miller does a pretty damn admirable job of trying to translate them. The film’s highlights are obviously the flashbacks to the Djinn’s life, which tend to look at aspects of mythology and historical settings that have not been very widely used by Hollywood in the recent past (not a lot of Ottoman Empire movies). These flashbacks are a bit more mythic than they are truly historical, it’s not 300 levels of stylization but they might not be out of place in a Tarsem movie or something. I don’t want to give too much away but each story kind of works as its own thing while also painting the picture of the Djinn’s larger arc and they also sort of tell traditional stories about the dangers of not wishing carefully while also not making the Djinn feel malevolent.
Where the movie falls off a bit is in the film’s third act, which I don’t want to give away too much about even though it doesn’t exactly have some wildly unexpected twist or anything like that. In short, once we finally finish all of the Djinn’s flashbacks and get up to date the film has to make a tricky pivot into “the present” and I’m not sure it finds as compelling a direction to take things at this point as what came before either visually or narratively. But’s that’s not to say the movie totally falls on its face either and there are aspects of where it goes during that back third that I do respect quite a bit. Beyond that your mileage with this movie will probably depend on your expectations. There are bits here that live up to the “visionary” branding that has been attached to George Miller as of late, but it’s no Mad Max: Fury Road (nor should it be) and I wouldn’t say it’s some king of visual game changer or anything. Context may matter a lot with how you react to the film. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to respectful but not entirely enthused reviews and maybe opening amidst the best of world cinema didn’t necessarily do the film any favors. The August of 2022, in the middle of one of the longer dry spells of new films of any cultural interest we’ve had in a while, this is going to feel much more welcomed by critics but even in that context I don’t know that this is going to set the world on fire. Despite that I can easily see this becoming quite the cult film at some point in the future and you’re going to hear a lot of people mentioning it as a bit of a gem.
**** out of Five
