Review: The Perennial Need for Love and Storytelling in George Miller’s ‘Ten Thousand Years of Longing’
“How can it be a mistake to love someone entirely?”
As a follow up to Mad Max: Fury Road, unsuspecting audiences may not know what they are getting into with George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing. Instead of vehicular carnage across an apocalyptic desert, you have a pointy-eared djinn telling stories of Turkish myth to a British professor. This turn for the fantastic over the action packed comes off as a “one for the studio, one for me” type of film for Miller, especially considering how divergent this original fantasy project from his major success. No matter its how Miller parlayed the $60 million budget needed to make this movie, we are all the better for it as his blank-check-swing netted audiences a meaningfully rich experience that probes two indispensable facets of the human experience: storytelling and love.
Tilda Swinton plays Alithea, the aforementioned professor who specializes in the study of stories. An academic summit brings her to Istanbul where she gives a presentation about how story telling is waning in our present, a lost art form done away with by advances in technology. This belief falls under our examination when Alithea inadvertently finds a djinn in a bottle while touring the city’s bazaars. Adorned with hairy legs and pointy-ears, this djinn, also named Djinn and played by Idris Elba, grants three wishes to Alithea, a proposal that would free himself from the prison he has been confined to for three thousand years. As an expert of stories, Alithea knows all about the cautions that come with wish making, hesitant to ask for anything in fear that those wishes may turn sour. Instead, she asks about how the djinn came to be, resulting in four ‘stories within a story’ that move across history with different characters, settings, and inter-connected themes.
As we move across history through these four equally compelling stories, we observe new instances of love involving Djinn and the people he’s granting wishes to. The first shows how his own heart’s desire left him cursed to a fate. The second showing how love makes us to see blindly. A third about the lack thereof. And a fourth cautioning against a love so strong it causes us to harm the very thing we love. The outcomes of each tale is not particularly uplifting, they are achingly heartbreaking if anything, but as we move from one story to the next, each one speaks to the “longing” in the film’s title: that the desire and need for love is present throughout history and as much a need as it is a desire.
This evergreen theme of love is equated to the art of storytelling, namely the emotions the latter can afford us that we may otherwise lack in our present realities. For Alithea, a broken relationship in her early years leads to a life of emotional reclusiveness, studying history for human connection through tales of others— as she says, “I suspect that’s why I like stories… I find feelings through [them].” Another instance comes from Djinn’s third story where an elder soothes a ruthless king with his verbal narratives. If the king is examined as someone driven to violence by the lack of love, then storytelling is analogous to love’s embrace. Additionally, Alithea and Djinn end up complimenting one another through story. She studies them, he tells them, and both characters experience the titular longing that brings them together. Given how Miller presents storytelling in such close proximity to love, one can assume that Miller holds both in equal regard.
This idea becomes fully realized when Miller draws comparisons between the past and present. The past sees the world’s inexplicable events rationalized through stories of gods and myths. In the present, those same stories become irrelevant, explained away with science and disproven by fact. Miller’s proposed view is that the world is becoming too cold, too fixated on social and technological and quantitative binaries that both love and storytelling have become incompatible with modernity. His final point on the matter, however, exclaims the need for both, a romantic and warm sentiment that resonates with the work as a whole.
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