Film Review - Three Thousand Years of Longing
Images courtesy of Roadshow Films.
Have we forgotten how to be human? This evocative and mystical film explores humanity’s obsession with reason, our desire and needs to feel wanted, and a mythos that drips with love. The subtextually rich film expresses itself as a light and enjoyable experience that begs to be seen on the big screen.
The story follows Alithea Binnie, played by Tilda Swinton, the unconventional star of the film, as a neurotic academic travelling to Turkey to speak at a conference. Along her journey, she sees an apparition that provokes her at the airport, then disappears. When she asks about it in the taxi on the way to her hotel, her scholarly friend jokes that it could have been a Djinn, a mythical creature. Again, she has an encounter during her conference where another apparition attacks her and she faints. Trying to escape and see the city, her friend takes her to a market where, fate, as her character calls it, unknowingly brings her to find a blue and white bottle that is home to a Djinn. It speaks to her in Greek and offers her three wishes, begging to be set free from his glass bottle prison. However, Alithea, content with her life, asks him to persuade her to make a wish, which he does through stories. The Djinn is played fantastically by Idris Elba who delivers many of the stories throughout the film in voice-over.
The film displays director George Miller’s expertise in his craft as he moves away from the B movie stories that brought him to fame and into a story that is provocative and socially relevant. The film gracefully explores humanity through the vignettes and passings of a genie. Miller has always used his camera and craft to tell compelling and intriguing stories and this film is no exception. The images have a sheen that is reminiscent of Mad Max: Fury Road with a consistently energetic story that demands your attention. There is no shying away from the brutality throughout history: violence and nudity is shown through a spectating eye, and Miller’s ability to express the pain in people's lives is at times devastating, and at others, moving. He understands that suffering is an essential part of life and that when someone is absent of emotion and is content in their loneliness, they don’t have the capacity to fully experience love or pain.
The story asks many questions, many of which relate to humanity’s adaption of the sciences over mythos and Gods, making sense of a world we don’t fully understand, and how we learn to love over time. Throughout the film, there are many integrations with the sciences like the moving image and flying machines and the Djinn explores the modern-day environments with wonderment, however, as the story moves on, he finds himself alienated in the modern day. As Alithea says in the film, “There is mythos and there is science”, and mythos acts as the foundation of the sciences and humanities and without the intersection of both, we would not have either.
Overall, Three Thousand Years of Longing is gearing to be one of the best films of the year in a sensual, lovely, fantastical, and provocative story, with a cast and crew at the top of their game.
Follow Jonathan on Instagram and Letterboxd.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is screening in cinemas from Thursday, September 1st. For tickets and more info, click here.