Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: George Miller
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba, Aamito Lagum, Burcu Gölgedar, Matteo Bocelli
Some of us go to the movies for stories, others for sensory thrills.
George Miller's best movies – his Mad Max series – have little to
offer those in the former camp, but provide plenty of visceral thrills
for the latter group. Miller isn't the first filmmaker you'd associate
with great storytelling, so it's odd to see him adapt 'The Djinn in the
Nightingale's Eye', AS Byatt's love letter to the form, as
Three Thousand Years of Longing, his follow-up to the acclaimed
Mad Max: Fury Road, a movie that shares more in common with a symphony than a
story.
Tilda Swinton is miscast as Alithea Binnie, a Northern English
narratologist (that's an expert in stories to you and I) who travels to
Istanbul for a conference. With an accent that verges on parody, you
can't help wonder why Miller didn't cast a Brenda Blethyn type in the
role of Alithea. While exploring the markets of the Turkish metropolis,
Alithea comes across an intriguing bottle. Despite the shopkeeper's
attempts to upsell her on something a little glitzier, Alithea purchases
the bottle. Returning to her hotel room she discovers that the bottle is
home to a Djinn (an equally miscast Idris Elba). As is their way,
this Djinn grants Alithea three wishes, but she claims she has all she
needs from life and is more interested in hearing the Djinn's
stories.
Thus sets in motion an anthology of three stories set in a dumbed down
and mashed up version of what westerners view as "the Orient," as the
Djinn tells uninteresting tales of his previous masters and mistresses.
The aesthetic Miller opts for to tell these tales will bring back
unwelcome memories of all those awful, CG heavy fantasy movies that came
out of Hollywood in the wake of Zack Snyder's The 300, and were it not for the presence of pandemic era masks, I'd swear the
movie had been shot back in 2011. Complementing the bright yet bland
visuals is the monotone narration from Elba, whose accent sounds like a
South African dying of consumption. As a storyteller, the Djinn really
needs more practice on his delivery. The stories are bland enough to
begin with, and it certainly doesn't help that Elba's voice will have
you dozing off in your seat as he largely just describes what we're
seeing on screen.
Equally as backwards as the film's visual aesthetic are its regressive
attitudes towards women and the Eastern world. Alithea insists she's
happy in her world of stories but the film makes it clear that what she
really wants is the love of a good man. Ugh, are we really still pushing
this outdated notion that women who focus on their careers are just
making up for an absence of companionship? Miller is equally patronising
to anywhere East of Berlin. Brought to London by Alithea, the Djinn
finds himself overwhelmed by the city's electrical fields, which raises
the question of whether Miller believes they don't have electricity in
Istanbul? And then there's the knuckle-headed racial dynamic, which sees
a white woman keep a black man as essentially a slave. Young people like
to look back at movies from past decades and mock how backwards their
sexual and racial politics are, but
Three Thousand Years of Longing is as problematic as the
likes of Weird Science and Mannequin. Swapping the genders doesn't make it any less so.
