3000 Years of Longing is an unusual literary adaptation produced and directed by the Australian director, George Miller. Audiences accustomed to the mechanized vehicular frenzy in Miller's iconic Mad Max movies will be disappointed by this film's relatively staid and sober mise-en-scene and the movie's rather deliberate pacing. The movie is handsome and filled with perverse details, but it's a bit uninvolving and rather abstract: the film feels a little bit like an adaptation of a theater piece and revolves around a long and intricately developed dialogue between a reserved professor of narratology (Dr. Alithea Binney played by Tilda Swinton) and a melancholy jumbo-sized Djinn (Idris Elba). The film's subject is how narrative is related to eros -- passion is confined by stories; stories somehow regulate passion. These ideas lead to broader concerns about freedom and confinement, allegorized by the various bottles in which the hapless djinn finds himself confined. The djinn has spent three-thouand years longing to be released from the glass and clay prisons to which he has been consigned by reason of his own desire; Tilda Swinton's professor, Alithea is emotionally "bottled-up" -- she's put herself into a bottle in which she finds herself comfortable enough, until the intervention of the genii. Miller characteristically engages with ideas of chaos and order -- all of his films, to some degree, involve a social order (or psychic disposition) collapsing into chaos and the regeneration of order from that violent disorder. 3000 Years of Longing, adapts a story called "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" (by the renowned author A. S. Byatt) and internalizes these themes of order versus disorder. Alithea has renounced passion to the extent that, at first, she can't even wish for anything -- she seems to thwart the earnest djinn by refusing his offer of three wishes; there's nothing that she desires. As the film progresses, she becomes increasingly passionate and, at the end, desires an erotic relationship with the charismatic djinn, but only on her own rather strict terms. The movie is highly intellectual, complex, and not particularly interesting -- in truth, the picture (only 108 minutes long) drags a bit.
Alithea Binney travels by air to Istanbul where she attends a narratology conference. At the airport, she encounters a strange figure who "manhandles" her luggage before vanishing. During a lecture, she sees a sinister giant clad in static-washed white who also threatens her to the extent that she faints. In the bazaar, she finds herself drawn to a curiously coiled vessel. Back at the hotel, the djinn appears from the vessel, at first, a giant figure of desire whose clenched fist is so huge that it fills an entire room. Gradually, the mighty djinn shrinks -- and this is thematic, as the movie, progresses the djinn seems to become less and less powerful until a late scene in which he is half-comatose and crumbling into dust and sand. (Djinn, it is said, are made of "subtle fire" -- human beings are made of "dust and sand.") Of course, the djinn is honor-bound to offer Alithea three wishes, subject however to certain rules. As a professor of narratives, Alithea knows the drill and expects that, if she wishes for anything, the djinn will somehow trick her -- these wish-bestowing creatures are sly and enjoy turning human desire against its possessors, demonstrating in the canonical stories, that desire is frivolous, impulsive, and ultimately perilous. Instead of using her wishes, Alithea tells the djinn about her lonely girlhood and an imaginary friend that she invented to console her -- there is a suggestion that the djinn now plays this role. She provides a flashback narrative of her marriage, a relationship which ended in betrayal -- she has carefully boxed up the evidence of her marriage and put it in a cardboard box stored in the basement on which the name "Jack" is written. (Of course, this is a way to confine desire and its disappointments in a sort of vessel, although here in a prosaic cardboard box.) The djinn has better stories and he tells three of them. First, we learn that he loved the Queen of Sheba, saw her making love to Solomon, and, for his jealousy, was confined in a clay jar for 2500 years -- the jar has ended up at the bottom of the Red Sea. (This first episode is full of ornate details -- the djinn's have black fur on their legs and Solomon courts the impassive Queen by playing a strange lute that develops hands to play attached instruments, bony fists to drum on hollow vessels, and a monstrous little face so that the lute can sing and hum and whistle). In the second episode, set in the medieval Court of Suleiman the Magnificent (another Solomon), a slave girl desires a royal prince -- she gets pregnant with his child with the djinn's connivance, but the Sulieman suspects his son of treachery and has both the young man and the girl murdered. The djinn is now trapped in a hamann (a bath chamber) with his bottle buried under a slab of floor tile. There are two warriors competing for the throne -- one, Murad IV, is a violent and bloodthirsty general, his "soul rotted by war"; his brother is fat and collects a seraglio of enormously heavy and voluptuous women who inhabit a chamber with sable pelts covering the walls. This episode is baroque but seems to go nowhere; one of the immense fat women (called Sugar Lump) slips on the slab and her huge buttocks break apart the stone revealing the djinn's bottle. In the third episode, the djinn is released by a 12-year old girl who is a genius. (She is married to a nasty, if ineffectual old man). The girl studies the cosmos and becomes very wise; the djinn falls in love with her, but when he proclaims her love for her, conflict ensues, and, in the end, she wishes that she had never met him in the first place. Alithea has now become smitten by the djinn and wishes that he would love her -- of course, her wish is his command and we are treated to some showy embraces between the tiny, slender pale woman and the huge and bronze-colored mountainous djinn. Alithea brings the djinn back to cold and rainy London where gradually, it seems, their ardor cools. The djinn takes to sleeping all day (djinn's don't normally sleep) and begins to decompose. Alithea puts souvenirs of her relationship with the supernatural figure in a box and puts it on the shelf with the box containing evidence of her first marriage. Then, she utters her third wish, freeing the djinn forever. In the end, Alithea and the djinn have, apparently, opted for an occasional and intermittent relationship -- she and the djinn meet from time-to-time in public parks and hold hands, but, perhaps, that's as far as it goes.
The story has a number of structural defects. Narratology is different from the study of myths -- these categories get mixed-up in the beginning of the film: Miller is greatly influenced by Joseph Campbell's theory of the mono-myth, the world-wide tale of the quest of the hero "with a thousand faces." It's this topic that Alithea seems to be lecturing on when she swoons -- and this subject is not, at all, the same as narratology, although, of course, now wholly unrelated. Alithea's sudden passion of the handsome djinn comes out of nowhere -- she has been resisting the creature's blandishments for more than half the film when suddenly, to our surprise, she has fallen for him. This is disconcerting. The film's ending is highly unresolved, so much so that we sense that the writer and director simply didn't know how to end the movie. Passion is different from a story about passion and, it seems, that Alithea has reduced her passion to a story or narrative that can be readily controlled -- that is, confined in a bottle of structure. This seems to explain the curiously remote relationship between the protagonists at the end of the film, but this may be an erroneous interpretation of the film - this aspect is simply not clear.. The movie is wonderfully imaginative and generous -- Miller doesn't like to assign villainy to anyone. At the end of the movie, Alithea gets into a bitter and obscene row with her two neighbors, mean and bigoted old maids. But she reconciles with them by bringing a wonderful heap of sweet candy -- made with chick peas and pistachios ("it just melts in your mouth" the djinn says). When the two old biddies eat the candy (or whatever it is), Miller focuses on their faces transfixed with utter joy and delight. (That said, the whole byplay with the old ladies seems arbitrary, an unnecessary add-on to the movie.)
Some of the scenes in the movie reminded me of the wonderful horror-comedy series What we do in the Shadows? In several episodes, one of vampires interacts with a djinn. Of course, like Alithea, he is very wary of the trickster djinn. The vampire wishes for a larger penis but he's canny enough to know that wishing indiscriminately for a "big cock" will result either in an misfortune or something even more grotesque. So, he carefully phrases his wish: "I would like a penis that is only moderately larger than normal."
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