Three Thou­sand Years of Long­ing – first-look review

Do you believe in soul­mates? When it comes to cin­e­ma, I do. There’s a per­fect match out there some­where for every film, a view­er just wait­ing to be trans­port­ed by what­ev­er it is their cin­e­mat­ic soul­mate has to offer. Three Thou­sand Years of Long­ing, the lat­est from Aussie auteur George Miller (Mad Max), and co-writ­ten by Augus­ta Gore, is a film ren­dered via the bright­est colours, the strongest flavours, the wildest rolls of the nar­ra­tive dice. There will be many peo­ple for whom it is love at first sight, and peo­ple in whom it pro­vokes a wild aller­gic reaction.

Imag­ine Wes Ander­son had adapt­ed Neil Gaiman’s Amer­i­can Gods – that’s the vibe here. Idris Elba plays a Djinn, an ele­men­tal being with the pow­er to grant three wish­es when you set him free, through the tried and test­ed method of rub­bing his bot­tle vigourous­ly. Til­da Swin­ton plays Dr Bin­nie, who unlike your typ­i­cal­ly naïve win­ner of wish­es, is a Pro­fes­sor of Nar­ra­tol­ogy, which sounds like what a Sil­i­con Val­ley tech firm calls their head of HR, but in fact means pro­fes­sor of storytelling.

Dr Bin­nie is unique­ly qual­i­fied to avoid the kind of good-wish­es-gone-bad sit­u­a­tions that Wes Craven and co spun into a whole hor­ror fran­chise with the Wish­mas­ter series. As the film begins, Dr Bin­nie is speak­ing at a con­fer­ence in Turkey all about myths and mag­ic and why we need sto­ries; she under­stands the assign­ment. The stage is set for a trip­py two-han­der full of branch­ing flash­back vignettes unfold­ing var­i­ous inci­dents in the lives of our leads, most­ly hav­ing to do with the impor­tance of sto­ry­telling and the pow­er of love. 

(They also make time for queasi­er inci­dents such as a vis­it to the nude harem of a fat fetishist, whose favourite naked con­cu­bine ​“Sug­ar Lump” dis­cov­ers a mag­ic lamp by falling with such force that she cracks a paving stone, in a scene which is per­haps sup­posed to play for laughs but feels poor­ly conceived.)

The project is a loose adap­ta­tion of AS Byatt’s ​‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ (pub­lished in The Paris Review). The dif­fi­cul­ty with adapt­ing this kind of mate­r­i­al is that it often risks destroy­ing the joke. When you read ​“Once upon a time, when men and women hurled through the air on met­al wings” and intu­it that Byatt is talk­ing about aero­planes, the read­er gets to put togeth­er the pieces of a puz­zle for them­selves, the humour emerg­ing from the moment that you solve this lit­tle rid­dle. On screen, when you hear Dr Bin­nie nar­rate the same line, but can see an aero­plane, the line is no longer a rid­dle, but only a slight­ly florid way of describ­ing air travel.

Three Thou­sand Years of Long­ing remind­ed me a lit­tle of Miguel Gomes’ epic Ara­bi­an Nights, a six-hour-plus chap­tered film cov­er­ing sim­i­lar themes of sto­ry­telling, love and long­ing. Com­par­isons between the two projects aren’t going to do this one any favours, but are a reminder that this kind of sto­ry­telling can be tran­scen­dent. Speak­ing per­son­al­ly, if I could have one wish, it would be that I had rewatched Ara­bi­an Nights (or Wish­mas­ter) instead of this. But that’s okay – there will be more than enough peo­ple for whom this off-beat fan­ta­sy is every­thing they ever longed for.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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