Three Thousand Years of Longing review: A fairy tale from Mad Max’s creator

Stories are dangerous. They surround us, even if we’re not necessarily aware of them. They can seize our attention because of their inherent appeal. They are everywhere we go, and often just by chance. They are why we see ourselves as good or noble — they’re the root of our delusions and the strength of our convictions. It’s impossible to tell whether stories serve us, or we serve them. This is dangerous. That’s what makes them stories.

In George Miller’s fantasy film Three Thousand years of longingAlithea (Tilda Swiftinton), a Narrator, is an expert in anthropological fields of study. She studies stories and the ways that humanity has been affected by them. This makes her the perfect protagonist for a story: someone who thinks she’s smarter than the one she’s in.

Alithea finds an old, filthy bottle at a curioshop while on her work trip. She brings it back to her hotel and cleans it. There, she finds that the new bottle had once held an Idris Elba (a djinn) from myth. Alithea, as in many tales of djinn before her, is entitled to three wishes.

The Djinn and Alithea, in bathrobes, talk intensely in Three Thousand Years of Longing

However, she knows this kind of story, and she cautions the djinn that there are no “genie offers three wishes” fables that aren’t cautionary tales. But the djinn is bound by the rules of the story, and in an attempt to sway her into making her wishes so he can be free, he tells her several anecdotes from his millennia-long history, trying to illustrate how her assumptions aren’t necessarily true. Maybe, he suggests, if she’s wise, she can make her wishes without fear of regret.

George Miller’s follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road His now legendary action opus is far more impressive than this. It’s a quiet, contemplative film that eschews action for a series of conversations between its two leads, visually dramatized in CGI-rich style. While the storyteller of the film is the djinn and the narrationist is his counterpart, the latter is there to question the work. Between their exchanges — most drawn fairly directly from the A.S. Byatt story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” adapted by Miller and his daughter, Augusta Gore — the audience is treated to beautifully textured vignettes about bloodthirsty kings, doomed geniuses, and dreamers who long for escape. Miller was an innovator in the craft. Fury Road’s relentless chases is now channeled into wondrous stillness, a canvas meant to capture the sheer yearning at the heart of a story. A desire to know and be understood more deeply by others. This could also be called love.

Three Thousand years of longing It is a slow-paced film that delights in the pure pleasure of hearing a well-told story. As the djinn, Idris Elba delivers his lines in a voice that’s sonorous and dripping with history. The lyrical language is poetic in a manner that survives the passage of time, speaking words meant to be remembered in a bustling scientific age where it’s natural to forget. Alithea suggests that the beauty in his stories encourages skeptical thinking, particularly when it is situated in a less lovely world.

The Djinn hides at the end of a hallway with a lantern raised in Three Thousand Years of Longing

It is difficult to see the tension that exists between modernity, fable and storyteller, audience and storyteller, critique and escape. Three Thousand years of longing. Modernity is constantly present in the edges of its story. It’s sterile and noisy. Skepticism. It is possible, as Alithea continues to doubt the djinn’s increasingly personal stories, that we may no longer be as sensitive to stories’ power, which leaves us that much farther from understanding or loving each other. Maybe we think we’re too good for fables or morality tales. Or perhaps we’re so self-involved that we naturally think every story hinges on whether we personally believe it.

There are films that change the nature of the air you breathe after you watch them, as a motif from its score loops in one’s mind and the color of the world outside the theater doesn’t quite live up to what was seen on screen. Three Thousand years of longing is one of those films, a story about stories — a fraught genre prone to self-importance — that isn’t solely interested in their magic as a cloying, unifying force. They can do more. They are even more dangerous. This is a satisfying way to discover this. It’s not possible to find a more rewarding and enjoyable way to do this other than to watch two people, who think they are the best at stories, trying to predict how it will end.

Three Thousand years of longing Opening in Theaters: Aug. 26,

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