Three Thousand Years of Longing (George Miller, 2022) (Patreon)

It's interesting that right now, George Miller and Baz Luhrmann are the two preeminent  Australian directors on the scene, because they both have highly specific aesthetics that, looked at in a certain light, can be allegories for problems of Australian white / settler culture in the 21st century. Where Luhrmann tries to divert attention from such difficult matters with a universalized form of razzle-dazzle, Miller has a more reparative approach, looking for a broadly based kind of healing through story, empathy, and embrace of otherness. Three Thousand Years of Longing is remarkably openhearted, even to the point of corniness. But it does suggest that the antidote for our sick souls lay in a more capacious view of world history.

The film is self-referential, often awkwardly so. Alithea (Tilda Swinton) is a Scottish academic who researches narratology, which in this context is understood more like folklore study. She doesn't seem so concerned with the deep structures of global mythology as with the shared humanity those tales embody, and an anthropological understanding of the ways that storytelling has allowed various peoples to grapple with the unknown. In her opening presentation, she identifies story as a kind of dialectical opposite of science, in the sense that stories can mutate according to the needs of a given culture, whereas science provides (or tries to provide) definitive, unchanging laws and truths.

As we discover, this opposition is a bit of a red herring, since Alithea experiences an inexplicable presence that, in the end, is revealed to be a combination of narrative and electromagnetism. She unleashes a Djinn (Idris Elba) from his centuries-long imprisonment in a bottle. Miller, recognizing the slippery Orientalism this genie-in-a-bottle concept has engendered, not only reconfigures the Djinn as a mostly embodied, desiring agent of history. He actively subverts the genie / master idea so precious to the capitalist West. Instead, the Djinn needs Alithea to need (wish), or else he is doomed. And once Alithea recognizes the consequences of her first wish, she discovers what it means to actually love someone, to risk one's heart in an "I / Thou" relationship.

As far as the Djinn's history of "masters," Miller and Elba do a really good job subverting the usual tropes, while also implicitly making an argument that myth and folklore do in fact help us explain rather common emotional phenomena. Though his three tales have all the Arabian Nights ingredients we might expect -- sultans, magicians, concubines, invading hordes -- they are really about three fundamental relationship types. The Djinn lost himself in the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), never establishing himself as anything but a devoted servant. With Gülten (Ece Yüksel), the Djinn is reduced to the "helper guy," waiting in vain for his beloved to recognize the error of her ways.

In the story of the two Arab princes, he is never really seen, because what he offers -- free will -- has no meaning in the society of the time. But the final story, of Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar) and her quest for knowledge, is perhaps the saddest of all. One might wonder, why did Zefir not make the most obvious wish of all, to be a man (or at least perceived as one)? Her love for the Djinn became inseparable from his ability to provide her with the resources other women could not have, and in the end, she blamed him for the fact that his love could not ever change the circumstances of their time. One can see parallels to a gay or interracial relationship at other times in history, in the sense that sometimes love is not enough.

Typically, when someone tries to make the argument that certain stories depict the timelessness of human nature, this is a way to avoid dealing with the messy particulars of history and culture. One sees this a lot in Luhrmann's films, that always assume any story can resonate with contemporary audiences with enough showmanship applied. With Three Thousand Years of Longing, Miller provides an imperfect glimpse of a renewed, globalist cosmopolitanism that ironically avoids Orientalism by plowing straight through it. In the film's present day, the Djinn, not unlike a Dr. Manhattan figure, has to negotiate his love for a human woman with the complications that arise from his essential nature. The idea that love may eventually succumb to the vicissitudes of natural forces, the fate of the planet itself, is a plangent note to end upon.