If you are expecting the latest George Miller offering to be like Mad Max: Fury Road, or if your idea of a good movie is lots of CGI and fast-paced action, this is definitely NOT a film for you.
On the other hand, if you love a good story told exceptionally well, with gorgeous, saturated visuals and top-notch acting, you owe it to yourself to see Three Thousand Years of Longing. Stars Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba create a tour-de-force performance in a fantasy that rivals anything Scheherazade could spin. Tom Holkenborg’s score ranges from lush, romantic sweeps to Middle Eastern influenced motifs. It is well-suited to the film, weaving in and out of the multiple storylines fluently.
Like the collection of Middle Eastern folk tales told in One Thousand and One Nights, this movie is also told through the literary technique of embedded narrative: a narrator tells the story, and even within those stories there is narration. It is, above all, a story about storytelling, sharing tales of love, magic, greed, power, and mythos.
Swinton portrays Dr. Alithea Bonnie, a professional “Narrologist”, and Elba portrays the Djinn. She’s scholarly, practical, and self-reliant to the point of emotional mummification. He’s sensual, magical, and passionate, and makes an utterly enjoyable Djinn. The interplay between the actors is fantastic—it has to be, as the tales told by the Djinn and the sumptuous visuals of those stories might otherwise overshadow it.
While at a “Narrologist” convention in Istanbul, Alithea purchases a glass bottle from an obscure antiquities shop at a Bazaar. She cleans it, which of course releases the Djinn. The main plot is quite familiar: Alithea gets three wishes in exchange for granting the Djinn’s freedom from the bottle. Being a storyteller, she wants to know how he came to be imprisoned in the bottle. That’s where the fascinating stories-within-a-story begin.
Each tale the Djinn tells of his “extravagantly unlucky” incarcerations is as opulent and over-the-top as one might expect, if one were trapped in a bottle for millennia with only memories and imagination as your companions. He tells the tales of the three women who had previously found the various vessels of his imprisonment and the wishes they desired. After each story, the doubting Alithea still declines to make her requisite trio of wishes but ultimately realizes that her heart’s desire is to have the unbridled emotion and true love that the others had.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is one of those movies that you’ll either find fascinating, or too-full-of-itself. For me, I was glad to see that the fine art of storytelling is not dead. It’s the cinematic “Djinn and tonic” that I find refreshing.