After the surprise triumph in 2015 of his Mad Max: Fury Road (MadMax. The Road to Chaos), we were impatiently awaiting the new film by George Miller, an Australian filmmaker cultivating a certain rarity: barely ten feature films in his 40-year career.
So here he is back after a seven-year hiatus with the aptly named Three Thousand Years of Longing (Three thousand years waiting for you), unveiled at Cannes earlier in the spring. Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba engage in an intriguing, but ultimately frustrating, philosophical-romantic-supernatural pas de deux.
The film opens with the voice of Tilda Swinton, who plays Alithea. Narrator of her own existence, Alithea recounts how her life took on the appearance of a tale during a trip to Istanbul.
Renowned narratologist, Alithea was invited to the Turkish metropolis to give a lecture on the importance of stories in history: a captivating passage.
However, after buying an old bottle in the big bazaar, Alithea is surprised to see one appear (very sexy) jinn. Immediately, the genie informs him that he can grant three of his wishes.
Unfortunately for the jinn, Alithea, because of her field of expertise, knows all the stories, tales, legends and myths – and therefore all the traps inherent in this kind of exercise. A rather fascinating discussion ensues, interspersed with stories in the story, as the djinn tells Alithea about his previous (mis)adventures on earth.
The latter goes there, too, of reminiscences, but all in all little.
action and speech
This bias could have created an imbalance, but in this case it is consistent with the nature of the characters. Thus, the jinn is an entity that acts, executes, and we become familiar with him in action, on the occasion of many backtrackings.
Conversely, Alithea is, by her own admission, a cerebral being. She thinks, hypothesizes, deduces, and it is through speech that we discover her.
The same contrast applies to the main locations: the past rhymes with palaces, decors and opulent costumes, while the present has a sanitized hotel room as its setting.
Concerted, the staging reserves its great deployments to the adventures of the jinn and is relatively discreet with Alithea. Although the filmmaker, who sometimes has a heavy hand with special effects, immediately resorts to a marked stylization: pronounced angles, chromatic saturation, false cuts (match cuts) mounting…
Gradually, the film becomes uniformly baroque, developments and invoices marrying the fusional impulses of the two protagonists. In this respect, however expected, the romantic turn turns out to be abruptly negotiated. Miller also remains oddly cold on that front; desire and sensuality remain theoretical.
Too classic
Unsurprisingly, however, Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba are excellent, offering welcome subtlety and nuance. Alas, the screenplay co-written by the director and Augusta Gore, which is inspired by a short story by author AS Byatt, lacks audacity, despite the subject. With a narratologist heroine, the chapter structure is too classic; the structure never really becomes trundle.
As for the concepts described, they called for dizzying flashes, which hardly materialize. In the metanarrative genre, The tale of talesby Matteo Garrone, even The things we say, the things we doby Emmanuel Mouret, were more conclusive.
Another downside: the internal mythology of the film turns out to be rather muddled. Perhaps it is the recent abundance of fantastic series with complex universes, but we are now used to more rigor in this area.
Jack-of-all-trades, Miller has already dabbled in fantasy, in 1987, with The Witches of Eastwick (The Witches of Eastwick). What could have been a great movie (Cher, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jack Nicholson, excuse me) ended up being a very good movie: that was it.
As is, Three Thousand Years of Longing is simply good: interesting and pleasing to the eye, but unfinished.