Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is a narratologist, specializing in techniques for telling a story in literary works. Single, solitary, dreamy, she observes the world with skepticism, but circumstances will lead her to meet a jinn out of an old bottle. A genius played by Idris Elba, who before granting him his three traditional wishes, tells him via spectacular flashbacks his story way The thousand and One Nights.
George Miller here adapts a novel by the English Antonia Susan Byatt: “We have always had to make the world understandable, which has always been unpredictable, disturbing, mysterious. These stories were fundamental a very long time ago, and we continue to tell them today, even if they are sometimes false, or toxic, it’s part of the same process”, emphasizes the director.
“We had to write stories, tales, stories, to make the world coherent. If we hadn’t done it, we probably wouldn’t have survived, for lack of protection from the world.”
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Two periods will then overlap and respond to each other in the film: the past of the genius, which transports us to the time of the Queen of Sheba, in the tenth century BC, to the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, in the sixteenth century, and this conversation, today, in a hotel room between Alithea and her djinn, who will end up falling in love with each other.
A situation which, according to Tilda Swinton, will push her character to open up, and no longer believe that she is self-sufficient to exist: “She has this pride, this dignity, when she says she doesn’t need to make a wish, that she’s satisfied. Because a wish would be something she can’t control, and couldn’t She has lived most of her life depriving herself of depending on others, she is autonomous, self-sufficient, but in a way it is also her weakness. opens when she meets the jinn.”
And if we have to pay tribute to George Miller, 77, for making this kind of original and ambitious films that Hollywood no longer produces or almost, the result leaves a mixed feeling, with visual tableaux not always in the best taste and a Idris Elba rarely right.