Some directors are so prestigious they get to make studio movies on the basis of one-for-them-and-one-for-me. George Miller has gone that bit further. He hit a mother lode of fan-acclaim seven years ago with his rebooted action-thriller creation Mad Max: Fury Road, but this new film – in all its oddity, sweetness and indulgence – shows he is now doing one-for-him-and-one-that’s-even-more-for-him. It’s an Arabian Nights-type fantasia which he has clearly been gagging to make for years.
Fury Road was of course very personal as well as colossally successful at the box office: but Three Thousand Years of Longing is such an intensely personal passion project, spectacular yet fey, it would get any other director thrown out of the pitch meeting and beaten up. It’s the movie equivalent of an illuminated manuscript in medieval Latin kept in a safe and allowed to be consulted only by accredited scholars making notes in 8H pencil. And yet at the same time it has the innocent, colourful if weirdly defanged exuberance you’d see in the kind of family movies shown on Christmas TV 30 or 40 years ago.
Miller and co-screenwriter Augusta Gore have adapted the 1994 novella The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye by AS Byatt, and the resulting movie, for all its assumed worldliness and gnomic wisdom about the stories humans tell themselves, is almost childlike in comparison with other, darker and more adult Byatt feature adaptations, such as Philip Haas’s Angels and Insects from 1995, and Neil LaBute’s Possession in 2002. Tilda Swinton plays a nerdy and bespectacled academic called Alithia Binnie, who specialises in the field of narratology and gets to travel the world participating in literary conferences about the structure of narrative and how it is embedded in various cultures’ languages and mindsets. (There is of course something mythic about this globalised activity that shows the now forgotten influence of campus novelist David Lodge.)
Alithia arrives in Istanbul for a literary convention and finds herself staying at the flashy Pera Palace Hotel, in the room where Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express: an incidental point without much relevance, although this hotel brand promotion might have helped with the production budget. On a whim, she buys an exquisite glass objet in a market, gets it back to her room and – whoosh! – a Djinn comes out, at first gigantic but then human-sized, played with a boomy voice and pointy ears by Idris Elba. This djinn has been imprisoned in this glass ornament for 3,000 years, longing for release and longing to tell his extraordinary story of kings and princes and intrigue. And he’s also longing to grant Alithia her statutory three wishes. But she can’t think of a single thing that she wants: calm, equable Alithia does not wish for anything, thus frustrating the central motor of narrative itself.
It’s a garrulous, yet almost static movie, and weirdly for a film about narrative there is no single overwhelmingly important storyline. Swinton and Elba sit around in the hotel room while all the exotic drama is given to us in flashback-fragments of wonder. There is something very old-fashioned about it, and I think a younger film-maker might have wanted to engage more knowingly with ideas of orientalism, race and gender. Yet for all that it is a little bit underpowered, with not much of a screen-relationship between Elba and Swinton. Miller finds in it something gentle, ingenuous and heartfelt: like rediscovering a forgotten children’s movie previously available only on VHS.
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