A Lamp in the Darkness: “Three Thousand Years of Longing”

Lately, I’ve been looking at a couple of directors who are well known to the broader public as genre-bound eccentrics but whose atypical works are often overlooked. People conveniently forget that David Lynch also directed “The Straight Story” and “The Elephant Man”. While the latter feels more of a piece with his darker material, it’s also one of his more linear constructions and is an outright tearjerker. Cronenberg is Mr. Bodyhorror to most, but seeing him only as such is reductive; the argument could made that, the recent “Crimes of the Future” excepted, he has not made a “weird/sci-“ movie since “eXistenZ” over twenty years ago. Likewise, George Miller is more than Mad Max (and don’t misunderstand: these are excellent films and “Mad Max: the Road Warrior” and “Mad Max: Fury Road” are stone masterpieces. 

However, it is a shock to a number of people when you mention that he also helmed “Witches of Eastwick”, “Lorenzo’s Oil”, “Babe: a Pig in the City” and the two “Happy Feet” movies. To these, he has added a new jewel in his cinematic crown with “Three Thousand Years of Longing.” 

The premise is simple; during a conference in Istanbul, a “narratologist” played by Tilda Swinton unleashes a djinn in the form of Idris Elba and there the simplicity ends. The film is intertextual, ruminative, and altogether lyrical. 

Swinton’s Alithea and Elba’s Djinn are two solitary, questing creatures; they are also intellectually curious and love a good conversation. Alithea, of course, in her studies of humankind’s stories across the historical vastness, is quite aware of the traps implicit in the conjuring of any djinn and his (in this case, a him) granting of three wishes in exchange for his freedom. As she points out, any story involving the granting of wishes is a cautionary one. Surely, this could be no exception.

We discover the Djinn’s first great love was the Queen of Sheba and all was well until Solomon arrived on the scene. When he says that he came to her, Alithea demurs, but the Djinn simply says, “madam, I was there.” Solomon woos and conquers Sheba’s love and through words of power, entraps the Djinn in his first bottle, where he remained for 1500 years. He is released by the slave girl Gulten who yearns for the attentions of Mustafa, the Sultan’s son. 

The Djinn takes an almost paternal interest in her and does his best to steer her into making, shall we say, more informed decisions. However, with her first wish, she is wed to Mustafa and with her second, becomes pregnant. Sadly, for her and our friend Djinn, intrigue at the court led to the assassination of Mustafa and our heroine flinging herself into the sea. She dies before asking for a third wish. The Djinn is reduced to a liminal, ghostlike existence. His existence seems to be divided where his essence is resentenced to the bottle, now hidden under a slab in the castle’s baths but another part of him is able to travel through the walls unencumbered, but also, unfelt, unsensed. 

Another era passes and we encounter a young man, Murad IV, who - having some Djinn blood in his line - is able to feel the presence of his distant kinsdjinn. Still, our companion is not able to succeed in guiding Murad IV to free him and remains under the slab as he watches the youngster grow into a bloodthirsty ruler. Nevertheless, Murad’s brother, oddly, comes to save the day.

A wastrel and debauchee by training, almost, Ibraham’s main concubine discovers the baths and upon readying herself for a relaxing soak, slips on the slab and owing to her rather ample proportions, shatters it. She discovers the bottle and releases the Djinn and in short order, wishes him back in the bottle and at the bottom of the Bosporus. Not quite what anyone was expecting. 

As these things go, his bottle is consumed by an octopus and eventually, retrieved by Zephir’s much (much) older husband, and he is freed once more and enthralled by Zephir’s genius. She would be the equal of Da Vinci, our friend Djinn avers, but it is plain that being a woman under the Ottoman Empire, her gifts are guaranteed to go unrecognized. No matter, her first wish is to gain all knowledge and short order, the Djinn guides her on that path, conjuring books and sharing all fields of knowledge with her. By now, they are deeply in love; he says he loves her more than Sheba even, and before long, she makes a second wish; to solve the equation that will explain all space and time. It is here that she grows cross with her husband but she solves the equation and now the Djinn begins his campaign to ensure that she does not make that third wish. She grows cross with him, no doubt aware that he is trying his utmost to stay with her. He elects to imprison himself in a new bottle - the one that Alithea discovers in one of Istanbul’s bazaars. 

Even so, his voluntary imprisonment becomes involuntary when Zephir in a fit of anger or pique, wishes that she forget she had ever met him and to that end, he is back in the bottle suffering the fate of the forgotten for the third time. 

By this point, Alithea has come to trust “my Djinn” more and more. While I’ve started with his stories, hers are no less compelling. How she conjured a boy when she was a child, a companion with whom she shared a secret language and how she developed an entire relationship that eventually vanished as she aged out of that magical time of childhood; to the extent that she burned the book that was a testament to this friendship of the mind. 

She marries and with her husband has a contented relationship until it is not. Academics, he takes up and off with a younger woman, and Alithea, remaining equanimous through the telling, says that it was as though a weight had lifted. 

She finds fulfillment in her career and colleagues and is contented with her lot. If her tales are not as glamorous or as compelling as her friend’s, they are no less real. However, her attitude of contentment - at least, initially - prevents her from being able to “make a heartfelt wish”. She just does not feel it. She proposes wishing him back in his bottle in order to hand it over to someone else who may be more desire driven. However, that does not seem optimal to him.

With each of his tales, though, and the longer they talk, the more Alithea’s heart opens to him and she wishes for them both to be in love. She asks if it is too much and no, of course, it isn’t. 

From Istanbul, the story shifts to a London suburb where we meet Althea’s two bigoted next-door neighbors, and who may be on won over by the Djinn himself upon meeting him (he is, after all, Idris Elba!) to some degree. And yet, and yet.

As Alithea reminds us with her narration, this is a tale of wishes and there are consequences; these are cautionary tales. Where does it begin to go south? 

She returns home one afternoon to find “her Djinn” in the basement slowly decomposing; he was sleeping and djinn do not sleep. She wishes him to be able to speak to her and tell her what is transpiring and honestly, it is grim. He is evaporating from existence as all of the creatures we call myths do when they are no longer required, no longer believed in. Alithea realizes at that moment that it is not just a matter of him no longer being believed in (although she knows he exists) or that his existence is no longer required or essential per se, but that her love for him and even his for her, is not something he was free to choose. She makes her final wish for his freedom and should he ever want to see her again, she will be there for him.

We move along to three years later where she is putting the final touches on a beautiful handwritten and illustrated manuscript called “Three Thousand Years of Longing”; she places the book, along with the Djinn’s clothes, into a box with a blank label that she places on a shelf next to her ex-husband’s things in a similar box labeled “Jack”. Shortly afterward, we see our Djinn walking toward her, healthy and whole. We learn that over the years, he returns to her.

Despite this being a recap, like all recaps, it does no justice to the film at hand. The film itself opens itself up even more after it is over. Miller does flirt with the idea that the Djinn might only exist in Alithea’s head, and if she is an unreliable narrator, it might well be that the encounter with her racist neighbors did not really happen. At the conference, she has visions with a couple of other figures that may not be of this time or this realm, but she dismisses them as figments of her imagination.

She is, after all, an anthropologist; when she first encounters Elba’s Djinn, she closes her eyes and counts to three…then six…then ten. Nope. Still there. 

Alithea Binnie is yet another minimalist masterpiece of acting in Swinton’s considerable oeuvre. She is not neurotic, or if she is, extremely accepting of her neuroses. Her contentment seems genuine and or but one wonders if the Djinn was guiding her to create “a heartfelt wish” or was there indeed one underneath that contentment, after all. It is by this that our Djinn is frustrated, repeatedly. His insistence that we humans all harbor such desires bounces off of Alithea until that final story. What changed? 

The recognition that he had given himself over to this mercurial woman and asked for nothing in return. Followed by the willful forgetting of him is the real imprisonment. Sheba’s amnesia was enforced upon her by Solomon and his later, imprisonment during the Murad segment was generated by fear; but the third imprisonment is the one that hurt. 

It is one thing to be forgotten by circumstance or history but to be discarded by one in whom you saw so much, for whom you felt all? That is not just imprisonment; conceivably, it is the end of joy and hope. Freedom would become meaningless. Thus, with Alithea, even though as she says, the love was wished upon him, at least, it gave him another chance to feel it and with his freedom granted, to experience it freely. 

In some ways, this is Elba’s movie. He is in almost every scene and once again, is a sheer delight. It is also a relief to see him playing someone with with and goodwill. His heavies and darker characters are layered creations, to be sure, but here, Miller has given him a free rein to explore a complex being; one wrought by centuries of existence. Or evoked by the imagination.

Was the theme of myths fading when no longer needed embodied internally by Alithea’s imagining the Djinn? She calls him “my Djinn” and while it is touching, there is a possessiveness to it that is ever so little disconcerting. I am also not sure how much of this was intentional, but a Black man being enslaved repeatedly and then freed by a white woman requires a little more attention.

Miller is not a politics-shy filmmaker and he is also not a fool. Race relations in Australia and the U.K. (just about anywhere) are not exactly evenhanded or based on equality. But that Alithea comes to the understanding that for this to be a genuine relationship, she has to set him free carries more substance than it might were the Djinn played by a fairer Middle Easter actor. That racism is a virtual enslavement makes it no less visceral; particularly, when we have violence and erasure carried out on a regular basis on black and brown humanity. 

On a lighter note, the verbal puns and references are fun and not without meaning. Alithea means “truthful”, the airline Alithea flies on is Sheherazad Airlines, they converse in Homer’s Greek, and so on. 

The cinematography by John Seale is, as usual, gorgeous. He came out of retirement to shoot it (his last film? “Mad Max: Fury Road”) and it is a swirl of colors and depth rarely seen in cinema these days. There is a sumptuousness to the palette when we travel into the Djinn’s stories and somewhat earthier tones when we reach London. Of necessity, the camera relies more on set-ups during the conversations between Alithea and the Djinn but there is a natural flow in the tracking shots around and through her flat that gives us a lived-in sense of things.

The rest of the cast is predominantly Turkish and everyone is rock solid. From what I can see, this is the first credit for many and I hope to see more of them.

Tom Holkenborg (Junkie XL) has crafted a world spanning soundtrack (his work is possibly the best thing about the Snyder DC films), alluring enough to sit through to the credits’ end.

Finally, mention has to got to Augusta Gore, Miller’s co-writer on the script. She is his daughter and I think we can safely assume that talent runs in the family. Nick Enright was originally set to write the script almost twenty years ago but died before he could; Augusta is his goddaughter.