Inside the “Itty Bitty Living Space”: Thoughts on Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

While Three Thousand Years of Longing has what I would consider to be some phenomenal posters with more of a fantastical bent, I decided to use this comparatively simple—even “boring”—shot of Tilda Swinton’s and Idris Elba’s characters in plain dress in a domestic setting to foreshadow some of what I’ll say below.

PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER! Itty bitty living space!

Disney’s Aladdin (1992)

 

            Normally when I write one of these reviews/critical pieces, I just post a brief spoiler (and possibly “content”) warning and then dive in; however, seeing as George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing is actually a more recent film—and as it didn’t do so well in theaters, suggesting a possibly larger than usual pool of people who have not seen it already—I’m going to make an exception here and start just below with a more general recommendation or review containing lighter spoilers, with a more typical spoiler-heavy discussion following it. Note that there will be some NSFW discussion involved in both sections, though that content will come up only very briefly in the “recommendation” and will be more prominent in the “further thoughts.”

 

Recommending Three Thousand Years of Longing (Light Spoilers)

            Put very simply, I recommend this movie, obviously. I’ll attach a caveat to that recommendation farther down, but for now I’m going to talk about it like that qualification doesn’t exist. Three Thousand Years of Longing is one of the more interesting films I’ve watched recently, both in terms of its visuals (which can be alternatively lavish, fantastical, and “trippy”) and in terms of its ideas. It is a story about stories, for one thing, though not in a way that I would consider obnoxious since it isn’t truly fourth-wall-breaking. The two leads—Tilda Swinton’s bookish narratologist Alithea Binnie, and Idris Elba’s unnamed, wish-granting djinn she unwittingly releases—talk about stories and try to work through their situation with deference to previous such situations as told in stories, and there are further meditations on stories and their value throughout, but there’s no awareness of this whole movie as just a story.

There are two levels of frame narrative at work in the film: first, with Alithea retelling the whole, entire story to some unidentified audience, which is a framing device that disappears for a substantial chunk of the runtime and could maybe have been more present, and, second, with Alithea and the djinn telling the stories of their lives to one another in a hotel room, which is the framework that shapes the majority of the movie and drives its dramatic action. The djinn needs Alithea to make three wishes so that he can be freed at last from servitude and his prison in the mortal world, but Alithea is an extremely cautious and thoughtful person who claims to have no wish-worthy desires, while also being more or less upfront with the djinn about how she’s heard stories of exactly this sort of scenario before and how, even if he is actually as trustworthy as he claims to be, the chaos of a wish can have unintended negative consequences that she would like to avoid.

            And so—the second framing device and the source of our conflict: The two characters talk about their lives to try to get an understanding of one another, and the djinn, in particular, tells Alithea about his thousands of years of waiting for release. This is to satisfy her curiosity, but also to convince her of why she should make the wishes and free him.

            It’s such a creative premise for a movie, and one so vividly and charismatically realized. This starts with the two leads, in part because of their natural gifts. Swinton is such a versatile presence in film, owing to a certain androgyny and agelessness. In a movie like Jim Jarmusch’s vampire love story, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), those qualities are deployed to make her into a great beauty and more sensual. Here, she fits snuggly instead into the role of a sexless, lonely nerd. There are other contributing factors, of course, like wardrobe and, obviously, the substance of the performance, but that’s Swinton’s same face in both instances. There’s simply a range there. Similarly, Elba’s voice makes him such a perfect fit for the djinn, with hints of both warmth and power that I can hear in his other performances as well but which really shine here with this specific character. The djinn has special and visual effects enhancements to make him more ethereal and imposing, but I think a large part of the character’s compelling presence just comes from Elba himself and shines through any makeup or CGI. And that last statement is a fitting summary of my feelings about this whole film. Unlike so much modern visual effects work, there’s a clarity and a charisma to Three Thousand Years of Longing that puts other efforts at creating a sense of wonder through modern technology to shame. Overly “busy” and dark and silly, this is not. It’s clear and generally very bright and vivid. And also very earnest—as while the movie has its moments of humor, it is largely sentimental and straightforward in its feeling, which is also such a relief to see nowadays.

            There is a pretty fair amount of nudity here, as well as some sex scenes, though the acts themselves are generally obscured in some way, the particulars not being as important as the fact that sex is happening. However, I think the biggest obstacle in the way of a lot of people enjoying this movie—and this is where the caveat from before comes into play—is with regard to its plot. As I’ve established, a sizeable chunk of Three Thousand Years of Longing, despite everything else that happens onscreen, is essentially devoted to two people (or one person and one djinn) talking things out, and the ultimate conflict, without spoiling it exactly, feels equivalently, appropriately, “small” or “human.” It’s the kind of story that is likely to disappoint someone looking for more action or suspense, though it may still work for such people because of the sheer variety of events and imagery on offer for much of the runtime. There’s not a lot in the way of, say, battles, but you see a little large-scale fighting and the aftermath of such an encounter (with some executions). There’s the aforementioned sex scenes, of course, as well as courtly intrigue and assassination set against a visually interesting backdrop of wealth and excess and sometimes magic across multiple time periods. Considering the scale of the story the djinn is telling, it also feels like a pretty fast movie overall, in contrast with the scope. It gets going very quickly and is not what I would call a “slow burn.”

            The fact of the matter, and the point on which I will conclude this general recommendation, is that Three Thousand Years of Longing is a movie “for adults.” And I don’t mean because it has nudity and sex and violence in it. I mean it with regard to the totality of its construction—its plot and the things that make it up, but also its performances, its earnestness, its meditations, and its choice of conflict. It feels like the kind of movie an adult should watch, in part because it is at its core about adults and their concerns, treated maturely. Miller’s filmography is fun to reference in succinct, understated ways because it is so noticeably varied and can be deployed to humorous effect. This same guy wrote and directed Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which shares this film’s clarity and charisma but is clearly very different as well, and he wrote and directed Babe: Pig in the City (1998) and Happy Feet (2006) and its sequel (2011). Like, man, that is some interesting range! That Three Thousand Years of Longing fits into this timeline following Fury Road just makes it doubly or triply fascinating, even if the actual reason for this creative “swerve” might have been something boring like apparent legal trouble with Warner Bros. regarding money. Whatever the reason for its existence, I would go so far as to say that Three Thousand Years of Longing is more Babe than it is Fury Road, which again, to me, is delightful with how it builds upon this existing pattern of diversity in Miller’s filmography. Less strictly personally, I just think this is something like objectively an interesting and well-crafted movie, with some very nice repetition/reincorporation of elements and ideas that I noticed even more of on a second watch, and I think it should be seen and appreciated by more people.

 

Further Thoughts on Three Thousand Years of Longing (Heavy Spoilers)

            Not absolutely everything I discuss now is going to be ridden with spoilers, and I won’t even go out of my way to spoil the entire plot of the movie in great detail. It’s just that I wanted to try to keep the recommendation somewhat snappy and brief, and that I also reserve the right to spoil whatever I want from this point onward in the interest of more thoroughly exploring my thoughts about the movie. I’ll both expand on what I already said above and add some new things as well.

            I was initially drawn in and charmed by Three Thousand Years of Longing’s opening narration by Alithea, where she frames her story as a fairy tale and, in setting the scene this way, describes modern things like airplanes and cell phones in the sort of… dissected, general, distant terms you might associate with someone out of time trying to describe a thing they don’t understand—like how a computer could be broken down into something like “a light box where your thoughts appear as words.” Alithea’s narration puts the present in terms that could be associated with either a far-flung past or future where planes are something so fantastical they could only be understood in this very descriptive, literal way that is frequently used in fiction in those other contexts (past or future) but is less often, I think, used in a present setting to describe said present. It’s an appropriate fit in this case, though, as it creates a sense of the romantic or whimsical or fantastical from the get-go, and that tone got me interested immediately.

I quickly started to doubt whether that positive first impression would stick, however, as the pacing of the film felt a bit too quick to me at first brush, following the opening. Alithea arrives at the airport in Istanbul and immediately this odd little stranger with a magical aura tries to grab and steer her cart with her luggage. Then, shortly thereafter, she sees a larger and even weirder-looking figure that is only visible to her in the audience at a presentation she’s a part of, and at the notion of science replacing mythology, this strange being roars “Rubbish!” and the camera zooms into his mouth as he lunges forward like a kind of bad jump scare in a worse movie. Before even the 15-minute mark, there’s a giant golden foot sticking through Alithea’s bathroom door. The CGI elements of the film have all the usual weightlessness and lack of real presence for the most part, and the weirder, more fantastical visuals and pacing together made me question if the movie was actually going to be good. (The one notable exception with the CGI’s expected lack of physicality being the effects, both visual and aural, that accompany the djinn dissolving into or appearing from a bottle. There’s a surprising, unpleasantly fleshy quality to it that I liked a lot.)

            My feelings clearly changed again as the movie went on, and I eventually came to think of this opening as just another strength that ties in with the main topic I want to focus on here, which is my sense of the film as one “for adults” or simply as “confident.” The rapid-fire introduction of the fantastical elements without some sort of slow-burn ramping up is really just a precursor to the even more exuberant weirdness that will eventually come, so one way of looking appreciatively at it is to say that it’s preparing the audience by not denying at all what the content of this story actually will be like. As I was (re)considering the opening of Three Thousand Years of Longing, I found myself thinking of the first It (2017) and how I felt about that movie—which is to say, surprised at how quickly it started rolling out its horror imagery without being coy at all about the presence of a killer sewer clown that preys on children. I didn’t find It particularly scary, but I enjoyed it a lot, in large part because of how it felt like such a departure from the sort of template for horror movies of the time that I had gotten used to: where you’d spend 70 minutes out of the 90-minute runtime (keeping in mind the 10 minutes of credits at the end) seeing little bits and pieces of suggested horror, with a kind of blowout at the very, very end. It felt much sillier to me by comparison—less conservative or grounded or mature, in a sense, if you wanted to make such an argument—but its confidence also won me over, and I ultimately felt much the same way about Three Thousand Years of Longing, though it is a romance rather than a horror story. It is so unabashedly a story about a woman who stumbles into a lush world of magic and falls in love with it that it trusts its adult audience to see somewhat cartoonishly magical figures almost immediately and to not react by tuning out. The movie is very much an R-rated adult fairy tale, but it’s also one that swaps shadow for light and cold for warmth. It is, in multiple respects, incredibly honest. And it’s willing to let its audience struggle with it a little, in terms of its subject matter and tone, but also with regard to certain other presentational choices.

            When Alithea first frees the djinn (after “rubbing” his bottle with first her hands and then an electric toothbrush—one of a few small potentially comedic flourishes in the film, none of which are over-emphasized or unnecessarily dwelt upon), the two have an extended conversation in “ancient Greek,” according to the subtitles. None of this is translated, and Three Thousand Years of Longing just lets the audience sit in the moment. Where the pacing before had felt breakneck, now it slows to a crawl as this conversation goes on and on, with Alithea presumably helping the djinn understand the modern times he’s awakened into. It was here that I believe my feelings started shifting again, as one way of looking at this scene is that it’s “confident” like I said before. It is trusting that the audience can listen for the occasional word of English and listen to tone and look at the characters’ movements and at the larger context of the scene and thereby arrive at an approximate (though still accurate) sense of what is going on. The movie does the same thing again at other times, with other languages. In this way, it asks something of its audience to an extent that a lot of movies—or at least mainstream movies, it feels like—do not. Although, while I can spin this design choice as a positive, I also have to acknowledge the ways in which it is negative. For one thing, there is a legitimate accessibility concern present, where someone who cannot see the images and has to rely on the subtitles is left bereft of important information. Depending on the exact circumstances, the various hints that help with the meaning of the untranslated words that I mentioned before—the characters’ movements and the like—might not be available to help the audience understand the scene, making it truly incomprehensible and not just inconveniently (artistically?) presented.

It is also just incredibly annoying to have real languages reduced to untranslatable, essentially Foreign, gibberish, as we see too often in subtitles with stuff like “[speaks Spanish].” This, broadly, is a move that may have a perfectly logical explanation (possibly something related to the labor of subtitling and how those who do it might not be given the resources to fully and properly do that job?), but even an accidental, even relatively “small,” lack of translation still points to a casual racism present in the industry—an assumption that part of a piece of media’s script being potentially invisible to a certain assumed audience simply doesn’t matter to that audience. There’s a choice, even if only subconscious, being made about which language is worth presenting and which one is not.

Three Thousand Years of Longing itself addresses the subject of racism very explicitly late in the film with Alithea’s neighbors, after she has returned home from her trip abroad. The two elderly British ladies ask her if she had any “trouble” with her “foreign friends,” and they say, “[W]e often ask ourselves, ‘Why would Dr. Binnie waste her time and intelligence studying the ways of others instead of upholding our own?’” “Everywhere one goes:” they say, “ethnics.” There seems to be absolutely zero ambiguity here in this exchange about the film’s feelings regarding these very real real-world ideas of replacement by barbarous invaders and securing a future for White People and so forth. Though the old ladies’ arguments about people naturally belonging one place or another do kind of get supported with how the djinn is just inherently incapable of surviving in this place… Still, Alithea is our window into the world of the film, and she seems to love other countries, and their stories. Elba, of course, is an actor of color, and his character here, visual enhancements and intended magical nature aside, is very clearly not meant to be white, and Alithea falls in love with him without reservations—after a point, though none of her initial hesitation about the djinn is really romantic, much less racial.

The subject of racism is not a huge part of the film, but it is addressed in such a way that there is little doubt about the filmmakers’ intentions. Of course, having good intentions doesn’t always mean the execution of the thing is perfect, and it is still worth considering even now if the film is not still, in some regard, kind of racist. It’s not Fox News racist, of course, but there’s part of me that squirms at how it sort of romanticizes The Middle East. The lack of proper subtitles, for example, leans into the mystery and wonder of a genie-granting-wishes story, and some element of the romantic or fantastical feels appropriate for such a story, but is it also too… typical of depictions of this part of the world? It’s not a piss-colored apocalyptic landscape populated exclusively by terrorists in this film, but does the take potentially swing too far back the other way, to racism by way of excessive idealization instead? When the djinn comes with Alithea to England, they come to realize that he’s unable to survive there because of all the signals in the air, “[t]elevision and phone towers, and such,” essentially the mass of human thoughts and feelings, and I immediately thought of 5G conspiracies and modernization. In the end, the djinn must return to his own country, if not another plane of existence, because he can’t be in this other environment. I don’t actually know enough about Istanbul to contrast it with big cities in the UK where population (and infrastructure?) is concerned, but my gut feeling is that this is potentially that idealization rearing its head a little. The djinn must go somewhere untouched by modernity, it seems to suggest, where magic and not technology stirs the air! Or something like that. These are feelings and concerns I had while watching the movie, and that I want to acknowledge and explain as best I can, though I will readily admit that this is one of those critiques I’m not capable of pursuing to the degree that someone else, with a better, more relevant educational or cultural background, might.

 

In the praise directed at George Miller’s previous film, Mad Max: Fury Road, I remembered a distinct focus on how situating the focal point of the high-intensity action at the center of the frame kept that movie understandable despite the complexity of the action sequences. Three Thousand Years of Longing is significantly more mellow, by comparison, but I became conscious of the same technique at work here, though I certainly don’t want to give the impression that I think the concept of directing the viewer’s eye this way is somehow unique to Miller’s work. Still, the above image of one of the more busy or lavish scenes demonstrates this well. It’s easy while watching the movie to completely miss all of the various other figures in this shot and to really only perceive the beloved Hürrem (Megan Gale) being lifted up by the sultan’s men using this distinctively lengthy golden fabric, which will return, fittingly, during the scene where the ruler has been deceived by her into murdering his son. This shot is not only easy to parse because of its presentation, but said presentation also characterizes Hürrem—the center of the sultan’s attentions, drawn aloft into a world of gold. And symbolically, her being drawn up is directly linked to the son’s death, because her ascendency (literal here but also abstract) is his downfall.

 

This fraught quality is the potential flip side of Three Thousand Years of Longing’s confidence with regard to certain subjects. The use of nudity similarly has a shadow self worth addressing—namely with regard to how larger bodies are depicted. As previously established, there is a fair amount of what I would classify as “casual” nudity in Three Thousand Years of Longing, where the context may or may not have some sexual component but where, nevertheless, I would argue that the bodies involved are depicted with a certain frankness and without the framing and editing normally used to create an impression of either lust or disgust. I mention the latter specifically because one of the djinn’s stories of his past features multiple scenes of naked women that could be called very “overweight” or “fat.” While I don’t think their bodies are necessarily deployed to disgust the audience (see, again, the aforementioned lack of charged presentation), they are said to be a specific preference of a prince due to a “fetish.” His existence locked in a fur-lined cell and soothed with constant pleasure is clearly meant to be both extravagant and aberrant: aberrant because it’s so extravagantly pleasurous. This lesser prince’s oiled-up hand extended through the slot in his prison door comes to rest on his own mother’s (clothed) breast at one point, really driving the excess and aberrance home. The type of women that he prefers are by association, if not always explicit admission, considered an extension of his perversion—or maybe of his neurodivergence, depending on how you interpret his behavior, as the intention seems to be that there’s something off about him, which, again, in either case, ropes in the women he prefers. As a result, their fatness is closely associated with these other negative-seeming (within the context of the film) qualities. This prince’s later ascension to the throne after his brother’s tragic premature death leads to him appointing one of his women—the largest, “Sugar Lump”—to a political position. Later, emerging from a bath while enjoying her independence, this same woman slips on the floor and her butt smashes the heavy tile under which the djinn’s lamp had long lain concealed.

I’m torn on these elements of the film, like I am with the racism, because of a certain ambiguity. I don’t think the movie’s visual language is expressly disparaging toward… Sugar Lump, but things like her name and the absurdity and excess and negativity of the larger context surrounding her and the specific concept of her slipping and damaging the floor with her backside feel less than empathetic in their totality. However, the movie’s exact tone regarding these subjects still leaves me uncertain.

The tone that Three Thousand Years of Longing most often strikes is one that I would, again, initially characterize here as “confident” in its surprisingly breezy ambivalence toward its content. The film is not unfeeling and is actually filled with emotion, but it is ambivalent in its presentation of concepts and images that other films would have turned into a Big Deal. That its main conflict, for example, ultimately becomes a matter of the djinn and Alithea simply not being able to be together the way that they want, instead of anything that draws on the wealth of characters and magic that take up so much of the runtime, feels dismissive toward those things in a way that mainstream films and audiences likely would not abide. That, as another example, Iblis is a sort of antagonistic force in the djinn’s path at one point in the past but does not really matter beyond that point denies an audience the sort of big-screen conflict they might expect. When I use words like “ambivalent” and “dismissive” in this way, what I mean is that Three Thousand Years of Longing casts its eyes (or directs its audience’s eyes?) across a wealth of evocative imagery and fantastical things but later puts all of them aside in favor of the simple plot of a man and a woman who can’t be together, for one reason or another. This is the major focus of the movie and not something equivalent to, say, how the Queen of Sheba, the djinn’s first love, just has this court of weird beasts and fantastical humanoids that is/are not explained. The tonal suggestion is that these details require no explanation, that they do not matter all that much—They simply happened to be there, but the djinn’s concerns lie elsewhere, beyond them, with other things. This is the same tone that accompanies the (potentially) fatphobic content I discussed above, and the fact that so much potentially remarkable stuff is considered unremarkable, in a sense, lends Three Thousand Years of Longing that vibe of being better than a typical fantasy adventure even as its focus diminishes and diminishes to fixate on one of the oldest stories known to man: of the lovers who cannot be. This is, perhaps, a confident move. Or it’s “adult,” because it drills down to a core of emotional verisimilitude instead of only frolicking amongst the stars.

Aside from things like the aforementioned lack of subtitles and the early pacing, though perhaps most similar to the former, the movie also tells its story in a way that feels very adult or that signals that it considers its audience to be adult or mature enough to fill in some gaps. When Alithea first meets the djinn, and after he has learned English, she tells him a sort of rambling short story about a spirit named Enzo that she knew when she was a child at an all-girls’ school, and about how her attempts to rationalize that spirit’s existence and to write it all down eventually led to her feeling like it was “silly” and that he couldn’t exist. The djinn immediately makes the leap to saying “And yet, I am here,” signaling without saying so explicitly that he understands the rhetorical point of the story without Alithea having to spell it out. The audience is similarly left to interpret the meaning behind both the story and the djinn’s response to it for themselves as well. For another example, Alithea’s second turn at storytelling is where she tells the djinn about her marriage. We see images in a photo album during the flashback as she’s talking in pretty vague or general terms about the relationship, and as she’s about to discuss it failing, we see a photo of an ultrasound and the handwritten words “The first and last image of little Enzo.” The text alone is pretty explicit (perhaps even needlessly so!), but the film does still expect the audience to parse the visual information and fill in some gaps without being directly told by Alithea how things went. We see, still almost casually for all its very deliberate and clear positioning, both the continued relevance of “Enzo” in her life and how her marriage likely ended, without belaboring the point, which is an efficient and maybe mature (or confident) way of dispensing information. This second example does present another accessibility concern, though, as visual/unsubtitled information is once again outright required to fully understand the movie. Further, this is also a good spot to acknowledge another potential overall weakness of Three Thousand Years of Longing, which is the lack of input from Alithea after she shares this information about her marriage.

I had imagined the two main characters more cleanly trading off telling the stories of their lives over the course of the movie, but the djinn dominates instead. While I know his story is obviously the more interesting of the two, I think Alithea’s boring (by comparison) human existence being told as lavishly and lovingly would have been fun and appropriate, because clearly the two are meant to be a pair and would come across more strongly as paired if the time was better split between them. They are a romantic pair, of course, but there are other connections as well. “Three Thousand Years of Longing” refers most literally to the djinn’s general existence and to the specific time he was confined in one form or another, but you can also view it more figuratively as an encapsulation of the human feelings of loneliness and longing for contact that Alithea has experienced. In the span of our short lives, we feel that sting very profoundly and perhaps outsizedly, owing to the relative shortness. Additionally, hearing more of Alithea’s story would also, I think, have smoothed the transition from her being somewhat wary of the djinn and the offered wishes to her wishing for him to love her, both physically and emotionally, which felt a little abrupt to me when I first watched the film, though there are some signs, like a particular shot of Alithea swallowing a bit hard during the djinn’s third story of falling in love with a genius woman whose entire world was her room—a semi-imprisoned state as the youngest wife of a much older merchant turned romantic thanks to the djinn and the knowledge he gave her. I guess it’s very safe to assume that someone like Alithea is actually lonely, regardless of what she says out loud, and that we as adults can make that jump without her spelling it out—a tactic I’ve praised plenty above, of course—but I still would have liked a bit more of a sense of balance because, again, the two characters are paired. Talking about her life, Alithea at one point uses very djinn-like language to describe her existence, saying, for instance, “I expanded into the space of my own life,” in reference to the end of her marriage, which evokes a clear parallel to the djinn expanding from within the bottle and a similar sense of freedom (having been) restrained.

The dialogue in Three Thousand Years of Longing is not quite as unrealistic or “literary” as in some cases, but there is a clear “flair” to it all the same when the characters say things like “We exist only if we are real to others” and “And yet, here you are. My impossible.” You could say this sort of poetic stylization represents confidence. Maybe there are links to the A.S. Byatt story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” which Three Thousand Years of Longing is based on, though I can’t say that definitively. What I can say, yet again, is that the movie takes some risks with elements that are fantastical or weird verging on silly or cringe, like some of the dialogue—or like the visual effects around the eyes of characters during a sex scene in the aforementioned third of the djinn’s stories, meant to demonstrate the verging-on-mystical sexual powers of the woman. While I think one particular shot of Alithea and the djinn together that illustrates their physical intimacy without actually showing anything (too) explicit still looks kind of “off”—as Swinton’s head perches owllike atop a nude body that I think might not physically exist—the movie largely excels at creating singular, intricate, and moving or unsettling scenes with what I take to be varying amounts of practical or computer-generated enhancement: of various courts in their lush prime, of an ornate bottle of ink spilling dark and corrupting tendrils over an abandoned work of poetry, of a man’s head separating from his neck to become a spider-like entity that then further breaks down into what looks like hundreds of smaller spiders, of a sword once liberally wielded against friends and foes alike sitting cobwebbed and abandoned and with a spider ascending near the hilt. There’s a loveliness to the compositions and a rich use of color generally. As I said earlier, it’s not at all the dark and hard to parse sort of effects-heavy film, where the obfuscation is possibly meant to hide imperfections or create a more Serious mood. Three Thousand Years of Longing simply revels in its fantasy instead. And in adopting such a confident tone while telling such an unreal, magical story, it manages to overcome the inherent flimsiness of the CGI and render the oddness (both inherent and constructed) a beloved part of the whole.

 

I like all of these poster (or poster-like) images for Three Thousand Years of Longing. They are all, in their own way, visually interesting, and they do a good job of setting up the film’s overall creative nature. I chose this one to associate with my piece on the film in no small part because I like this particular composition a lot—namely the painterly color and texture of the clouds and sky and how both seem to bend and turn around the two main characters. It sort of gestures at the film’s major focus on the quite simple, relatable relationship between these two in a subtle but also striking way that still incorporates hints of the fantastic. This image of Elba’s and Swinton’s characters was arresting enough that it played a substantial role in making me want to see the movie. When I think of it now, I still think first of this image of the two of them.

 

The final revelation of Three Thousand Years of Longing, that love must be given and cannot be forced (read: granted via wish) in order to flourish, feels a little of a kind with my relationship with the entire movie, which, as I said, started off strong at first sight, then regressed, but then ultimately bloomed, albeit with some reservations. That impression of this as a “confident” film or as a film “for adults” was my overriding sentiment while watching it and as I started thinking about writing about it. While still plenty fantastical, I think Three Thousand Years of Longing embodies a maturity long missing from theaters. Its biggest nod toward the overwhelming cultural juggernaut of superhero movies comes early on during that presentation where Alithea gets jump-scared by a djinn, during which she and her co-presenter discuss the history and use of narrative to explain the world. There’s a connection made between ancient gods and modern superheroes via an image of the latter onscreen as we’re told “These are their vestiges.” I’ve seen this thinking in the wild myself—first, in a classroom years ago, where the 2012 Avengers movie was used to teach the concept of an epic hero, and, second, in certain Twitter discussions, where the notion that IP belonging to massive corporations (that can and will sue or cease-and-desist you if you tamper with their belongings) are in any way comparable to rich traditions of oral and written storytelling, where anyone could add to and alter the material, was pretty roundly criticized. Next to Swinton’s seeming head-body mismatch I mentioned before, this early bit where superheroes are given a little too much credit might be the most laughable part of the movie… Or maybe it didn’t even genuinely mean it? After all, if you were something very technical like a narratologist giving a presentation to a (maybe) general audience, you’d probably drop some bit of pop culture fluff like superheroes in there quick to make a connection, right?

Like so many other things it touches upon, the movie does not belabor this point or return to it. In the end, it’s simply part of the larger tapestry and only worth mentioning here because it personally bothered me and possibly cheapens the movie’s Deep Thoughts on storytelling a little for how neon-lit and tawdry it feels by comparison to the rich well of emotion and fantasy Three Thousand Years of Longing otherwise draws from the majority of the time. If my language here is a bit too exuberant, then that’s still just in keeping with the tone established by my subject.