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Three Thousand Years of Longing movie review (2022) | Roger Ebert (2024)

In a much-bruited scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 film “Pierrot le Fou,” the sui generis American filmmaker Sam Fuller turns up at a party and is asked by Jean-Paul Belmondo to define cinema. He says: “A film is like a battleground. Love, hate, action, violence, death, in one word, emotions.”

“Three Thousand Years of Longing,” the new film directed by the protean “Mad Max:Fury Road” creator George Miller, is very much a battleground. And very much about the emotion tagged in the title. In the case of Alithea, the academic played with traits both prim and feisty by Tilda Swinton, the longing is one she denies. Introducing herself in voiceover as a “narratologist,” that is, a studier of stories, she cherishes her solitary self-sufficiency. Arriving in a storybook-bright Istanbul for a conference, she’s put up in the Agatha Christie room of the Pera Palace Hotel. “She wrote Death on the Nilehere,” Alithea is told. The movie will be about emotion, but also about storytelling and stories.

During a lecture Alithea faints after a hallucination. We are to ask, later, whether it was a hallucination or something ancient and real calling to her. Back in her hotel room, she tries to scrub off an ornamental bottle she picked up at an antique shop. And yes, she unleashes a genie, or djinn, and a giant one at that—the sight of his enormous foot opening her bathroom door is something unusual to be sure—who, upon learning some English, proffers Alithea the standard three wishes. As played by Idris Elba, the djinn is a figure grave, funny, absurd, and moving.

As for those wishes: not so fast. As a narratologist, Alithea knows that a djinn is one gift horse worth looking in the mouth. The wish-fulfillment narratives involving genies famously never work out—either due to the stupidity/venality of the wisher or, more pertinent to Alithea, the fact that genies are notorious tricksters. There’s a reason they end up trapped in bottles, after all. And so, rather than a wish-fulfillment journey, Alithea begins an interrogation.

The djinn’s first tale sets the tone and pace for the rest of the movie. He was a consort,or so he claims, and teacher to the famed Queen of Sheba (“She was not beautiful. She was beauty itself,” the Djinn avers, and in the form of actress Aamito Lagum, she indeed is), until that wily Solomon came along. Even the elaborate tableaux of Cecil B. DeMille aren’t sufficient preparation for the production design and CGI-driven phantasmagoria of this tale, which features, among other things, a kind of self-playing lyre, the better to augment the song of Solomon that seduces Sheba.

As it turns out, over the centuries, it’s always a woman who’s responsible for the djinn’s captivity, but this is not a nesting-doll tale of misogyny. (It is adapted, very loosely, from a novella by renowned British writer A.S. Byatt.) It’s more a chronicle of how love and hate can make one do funny things. And about the paradox of being human, our intrepid selves and our shadow selves. So much human achievement is depicted here, and so much human atrocity. As is observed near the end of the picture, “Despite all the whiz-bang, we remain befuddled.”

As the tales unfold, Alithea, while never entirely letting down her guard, comes to understand that the lack of love in her life is more upsetting than she’s been willing to admit to herself.

That sounds dry. The movie is not. The tales told by the djinn are packed with hair-raising violence and extremely variegated landscapes of lust. One would-be ruler, a very slow and heavy fellow, is confined to a sable-lined room by his mother, where he is supplied with a steady stream of women of unusual size, whom he drools over. This episode is staged and shot with Fellini-esque relish by Miller—it’s a bit of an elaboration on the wet nurse scene in “Fury Road.”

Speaking of “Fury Road,” after the mostly practical and in-camera effects of that hair-raising epic, it’s interesting to see Miller return to what appears to be a predominantly CGI mode, although given his work on films like “Babe: Pig in the City” and “Happy Feet,” it shouldn’t be unanticipated. His mastery makes the movie eye-popping; his freedom and audacity make it surprising and unsettling.

One may also be unsettled that the movie arguably partakes of what the scholar Edward Said called “orientalism.” Western culture taking Eastern culture and molding it to its own ends, to put it one way. In many respects Miller shows scrupulousness. The ancient world depicted here is not whitewashed in the casting department (Lagum, who plays Sheba, is Ugandan, and won the first season of “Africa’s Next Top Model”). But just the idea of a Black Djinn and a white Englishwoman in a battle of wits over narratives real and fictional is apt to strike a dissonant chord with some. Is Miller exercising his freedom as a creative artist or taking undue license? I believe the former. And I believe that the compassion and imaginative energy he brings to the project (this hardly looks like the work of a director who’s almost 80) justifies his choices, if indeed any justification were really necessary.

Available in theaters tomorrow.

Three Thousand Years of Longing movie review (2022) | Roger Ebert (2024)

FAQs

Is the movie Three Thousand Years of Longing a good movie? ›

Three Thousand Years of Longing, starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, is just the ticket for anyone wishing for something different to watch. Fresh score. Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing is a challenge to those who feel content with loneliness, wrapped in their blankets of cynicism.

What was the last movie reviewed by Ebert? ›

The last review by Ebert published during his lifetime was for The Host, which was published on March 27, 2013. The last review Ebert wrote was for To the Wonder, which he gave 3.5 out of 4 stars in a review for the Chicago Sun-Times. It was posthumously published on April 6, 2013.

What was the last movie Roger Ebert saw? ›

Roger Ebert continued to review movies until the end of his life, despite the challenges of his cancer, which inspired others facing the same disease. Terrence Malick's To the Wonder was Ebert's last review and showcased the director's iconic style and departure from his previous period pieces.

Did the Djinn love Alithea? ›

Although Djinn and Alithea couldn't be together in a traditional sense, Djinn's occasional return to London to see and spend time with Alithea conveyed how much they loved each other.

Why did three thousand years of longing flop? ›

Variety called it "a terrible result for a movie that's playing in thousands of theaters across the country", and noted that it would be one of the biggest box office bombs of 2022, with industry experts blaming lack of marketing and the wide-release strategy.

What is the point of three thousand years of longing? ›

George Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing, which is based on A.S. Byatt's 1994 short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye,” is instead a story about stories themselves: about the power of narrative, the feats of imagination that sustain and connect us.

What is the movie with the best reviews? ›

To date, Leave No Trace holds the site's record, with a rating of 100% and 252 positive reviews.

Were Siskel and Ebert friends? ›

After Siskel's death, Ebert reminisced about their close relationship saying: Gene Siskel and I were like tuning forks, Strike one, and the other would pick up the same frequency. When we were in a group together, we were always intensely aware of one another.

How old was Roger Ebert when he died? ›

Death. On April 4, 2013, Ebert died of cancer at age 70 at the Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago according to the Chicago Sun-Times. His wife Chaz said that "We were getting ready to go home today for hospice care, when he [Ebert] looked at us, smiled, and passed away." He battled cancer for 11 years.

What's the most stars Roger Ebert gives? ›

The late great Roger Ebert acknowledged this in his review of the film, awarding it his famous and highest rating of four stars, making it the last film to receive such an honor from arguably the most influential film critic of the past fifty years.

What was quite Tarantino's last movie? ›

And one of those movies that will not be made — as the world learned April 17 — is The Movie Critic, which was billed as Tarantino's 10th and final film.

What are the last five movies Bruce Willis made? ›

Filmography
YearTitleRole
2022Detective Knight: Redemption (2022)James Knight
2021Cosmic Sin (2021)James Ford
2021Midnight in the Switchgrass (2021)Karl
2021Out of Death (2021)Jack Harris
96 more rows

What is the Djinn saying in Three Thousand Years of Longing? ›

Genie : This, then, is our fate, Alithea. If you make no wish at all, I will be caught between worlds, invisible and alone, for all time. Alithea Binnie : [narrates] If there is fate, who can say? But I tell you this: in the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, there are sixty-two streets, and four thousand shops.

Was the Djinn in Three Thousand Years of Longing real? ›

While the stories are fake, the Djinn and his history was made up by Alithea to tell a parable about the importance of love and the danger of locking oneself away, which is the true meaning of Three Thousand Years of Longing.

Was Three Thousand Years of Longing nominated for an Oscar? ›

Is three thousand years of longing inappropriate? ›

For adults only. This amazing movie was directed by George Miller who is best known for Mad Max. Some of you may have also seen one of his earlier stories, Lorenzo's Oil ( A true story, which this is not). 3000 Years of Longing is an R rated fairy-tale full of the violence of history, with plenty of nudity and sex.

What is the longest movie to ever exist? ›

The longest film ever made, according to Guinness World Records, is "The Cure for Insomnia" (1987), directed by John Henry Timmis IV.

What is the longest movie to ever film? ›

List
FilmRelease yearNumber of years
Mad God202130
Marketa Lazarová19673
Marwencol20104
Merrily We Roll AlongTBD5
73 more rows

What is the longest most meaningless movie in the world? ›

The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World is an underground movie made in the UK that runs to 48 hours long, created as a collaboration by respectively French and British filmmakers Vincent Patouillard as directors and Anthony Scott in production in association with the Swiss Film Centre and the London Film- ...

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