D.to the first short film directed in 1971 George Miller made 10 films (and some videos). 10 are not very many, but not even a few. Those for which it is recognized look alike (Interceptor 1 and 2 between the late 70s and early 80s, with Mel Gibsonwith whom he later shot Mad Max in 1985, to return to the subject with Fury Road in 2015 and with the expected Furious to be seen next year), but he is also the author of Babe goes to town, Happy Feet, The Witches of Eastwick And Lorenzo’s oil).
Not just apocalyptic, then. Even childish and melodramatic if necessary. So what 3000 Years of Longingthat is “3000 years of desire”, both the anti-Mad Max, as he himself stated, it is not surprising. The inspiration for the Australian came from an English author, sublime and always overloaded, Antonia Byatt, already hired by the cinema for costume dramas, Angels and insects with Patsy Kensit and Kristin Scott Thomas from 1995 and Possession 1992 with Gwyneth Paltrow.
Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba.
“A story that seemed to probe many of life’s mysteries and paradoxes, and so succinctly, ”Miller said. «Once read The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994 novel, ed) stayed with me, as some stories tend to do… then, one day it occurred to me that it had to be a film ».
The protagonists of its history are Alithea, Tilda Swinton, a storyteller, a storyteller, a story scientist, and a Djinn (Idris Elba)who once released from the bottle where he had been locked up for a few thousand years, offers her three wishes in exchange for her freedom. But Alithea knows better than himan expert manipulator, knows inside out all the stories and myths about the desires that brought down those who expressed them.
The Djinn then pleads his cause (she risks bottling again if she doesn’t and, worse, oblivion) by telling her fantastic stories from her past. Eventually Alithea will be seduced and will end up expressing a surprising desire.
“3000 Years of Longing”, the poster.
3000 Years of Longing: the geyser counter
“I approach stories as if people are using Geiger counters,” George Miller said of himself, “looking for a rich and dramatic radiation“. In this film, that alternate word (self Fury Road was mainly set outdoors, this is mostly indoors, in an Istanbul hotel room), and historical-mythological reconstruction (but if his post-apocalyptic sagas shine for inventiveness, here they are two splendid actors in bathrobes to trigger the story in a compressed period of time, three days and two nights, while the story unfolds over three thousand years).
Reflection on desire and the dangers it entails in this sort of One Thousand and One Nights has at heart the choice of an actress like Tilda Swinton. Her Alithea, a learned and multilingual middle-aged woman, she cut herself off from life and emotions: he preferred science and its geometries to unpredictability. So when a Djinn touches her at Instabul airport (and is mistaken for an abusive taxi driver) something happens: a new feeling, a destiny that comes to fruition for her and for the buried genius under a pile of colored bottles in a souk shop.
The dialectic between the two protagonists, from present-day Istanbul, then takes us back in time, in the Middle East of classicism, in the intrigues of the Ottoman Empire, to finally take us to London today during the pandemic. There, in the cacophony of the metropolis, Alithea leads her Djinnwill not be roses and flowers, but at least a recomposition, in the name of the good neighborhood with the mediation of an ancient Middle Eastern recipe for irresistible treats, it will take place. 3000 years of desire lead to a stone’s throw from home, on the doorstep of two old English ladiesperhaps racist, perhaps just frightened, they too inevitably seduced.
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