Adapted from A. S. Byatt's short story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye," Three Thousand Years of Longing is a fantasy-romance starring Tilda Swinton as Dr. Alithea Binnie, an outwardly independent and contented narrative scholar who purchases an antique bottle while lecturing in Istanbul and discovers that it contains the spirit of an eloquent and powerful Djinn (genie) played by Idris Elba. It’s a surprising latest for director George Miller, the Australian stylist whose last effort was the apocalyptic action festival Mad Max: Fury Road. Despite being a belated fourth installment in a cult franchise that Miller started all the way back in 1979, Fury Road proved not only to be a critical darling, but also a modest financial success. Three Thousand Years of Longing, on the other hand, is currently taking a wallop at the box office, despite a fairly substantial publicity push from distributors Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Apparently Miller’s name just doesn’t have enough marquee draw, even for anyone still riding high on the nitrus-boost of Fury Road. But it’s doubtless that whoever gets pulled in by the powerhouse leads and the chaotic and vague trailers for the film are going to be coming out with only the kind of polarized word-of-mouth guaranteed to dissuade more than to recommend the increasingly taken-for-granted theatrical experience.
While the publicity is pitching Three Thousand Years of Longing as an already narrowly appealing pageant of the sensuous and the bizarre, implying an Oriental adventure across time and space, the reality is that Miller’s film, co-written with his daughter Augusta Gore, is a rather restrained effort, much of it bound to a single hotel room where Elda’s Djinn, in the style of the Arabian Nights, regales Dr. Binnie with stories of his various mortal loves and entrapments. Even the elaborate flashback sequences used to illustrate these stories are not terribly elaborate, or, rather, elaborated upon, depending highly upon the Djinn’s narration rather than letting them play out as self-contained vignettes where we really inhabit the world of their supporting characters. Miller’s stylistic indulgences are themselves all but entirely confined to the background of the film’s art and production design. There’s nothing really “in your face” or ecstatic or showman-like about the film. It does not so much play out like a film in which stories are being told, as much as a film that is aggressively and passionately about storytelling. To this extent, Three Thousand Years of Longing is rather faithful to Byatt’s story, to lengths that it comes off as un-cinematically rigid, and all too apparently wanting in its capacity to impart, rather than merely impress with its passions. It’s a hard experience to get into, or get anything out of. But if this is part of Miller’s “one for me, one for them” trade-off with the majors while he simultaneously works on the expansion of his Mad Max-mythology (a spin-off of which, Furiosa, started principal photography this June), then I must say that, despite its awkward and alienating narrative structure, its comparatively insipid approach to the themes of its source, and the under-realized contours of its visual spectacle, Three Thousand Years of Longing proves to be, warts-and-all, a remarkably poignant and welcome turn in Miller’s filmography, especially coming off the mere sound and fury of the far overrated Fury Road.
A tremendous amount of the heavy-lifting is done by the cast, even when they’re given little to say. Special commendations are due to Matteo Bocelli as Prince Mustafa, the son of an Ottoman sultan doomed by palace intrigue; Ece Yüksel as Gulten, herself doomed by her love of the former; Ogulcan Arman Uslu as Murad IV, another sultan whose soul is corrupted by the fog of war; and Burcu Gölgedar as Zefir, the teenage wife of a Turkish merchant who herself becomes the Djinn's lover.
Miller is notable for his fondness for silent cinema, and has developed something of a reputation for telling stories primarily through a visual style that, while frequently ostentatious, is also notably hyper-efficient. But while his career has taken him in a variety of idiosyncratic directions – from helming the black comedy The Witches of Eastwick to the family fare of the Babe and Happy Feet films – he’s rarely had the opportunity to test his stylistic mettle against a more static or prose-driven subject. And for that opportunity, he is at least commendable in spirit, because there are probably few sources that would have proved more challenging in this regard than “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.”
Originally published in the winter 1994 edition of The Paris Review, Byatt’s text is certifiably postmodern in its own approach to a story about a scholar of storytelling taken on an odyssey of stories, the analysis of and commentary upon which is foregrounded rather than sublimated. Ambitious in scope and intertextually dense to the point of being quite cryptic, “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” is simultaneously a fairy tale and essay, and Three Thousand Years of Longing is at its weakest when Miller and Gore attempt to replicate its intentional superfluousness and redundancy, or bastardize it into a more crowd-pleasing awe of the magical and sublime.
It’s a cliché to write something off as “un-adaptable,” given that any story that’s good enough is technically “un-adaptable,” in the same way that any movie that is even modestly artistic in its aims is “un-advertisable.” And the problem is truly not that Miller has failed to more or less successfully adapt Byatt’s story, or to all the more successfully switch up its conclusion and take its own story in a rather bold and emotionally effective direction. The problem is more that Miller is too in awe of the superficially sublime and magical, and too averse to the kind of subtly acerbic tone of Byatt’s writing. He approaches Three Thousand Years of Longing with a visual economy analogous to Byatt’s more academic economy of prose, but fails to translate what the Djinn in “the Nightingale’s Eye” describes as the “strange, glancing” aspects of the modern memoirs that the scholar spins for him, and thus for the reader, which are at once voluminous in detail and potential themes but inevitably “peter out,” having “no shape.” That sort of attention to minor, “glancing” detail, without the same stylistic impulse to streamline and simplify, might be better handled by someone like Luca Guadagnino, whose own Suspiria, written by David Kajganich, comes much closer to visually distilling the sense of the “floating redundant” that Byatt uses to characterize her protagonist and her postmodern fairy tale. Miller may directly quote from “the Nightingale’s Eye,” but seems somewhat averse to visually communicating ideas that aren’t, in the strictest sense, pertinent. He doesn’t so much “miss the point” as he is too “on point.” Hence, despite reliably solid performances, Elba and Swinton’s interactions within the hotel room feel too often like a story being described, rather than a story being told cinematically.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is at least different and interesting enough to qualify as a quality cinematic experience, but it isn’t really until Dr. Binnie and her Djinn get out of the hotel room and return to the scholar’s native London that it really shines, and gestures at the film that could have been. It is here that Miller tackles a style of drama that is virtually unprecedented in his career, and comes up with something that is deeply and subtly beguiling, some weird mixture of Harry Potter and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. It is also here that his approach to storytelling is most akin to the effervescent, glancing enigma of Byatt’s own fairy tale. Whether or not this last act makes the preceding investment worthwhile is ultimately a matter of patience; whether one is open to perceiving in the film’s conclusion a continuity of its overall challenging of the spectator to indulge a certain kind of fantasy story in which its two protagonists spend much of the time inactive, watching and listening, as superficially assured and contented as Swinton’s Dr. Binnie while tremoring with mournful and erotic tension. I myself found much of the film to be merely stagey and goofy rather than stimulating. For all that, though, I also think there’s some tremendous filmmaking in just that sublime finale.
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