Original in Spanish: Tres mil años esperándote
George Miller comes out of shooting Mad Max: Fury Road and the next thing he makes is a film about two people in bathrobes talking in a hotel room.
Officially this is now my favourite kissy movie, it even beats Heated Rivalry.
I like it because the lead is oldish and although the djinn is very old too, he doesn’t look it. I like it because the djinn loves a handful of women and nobody judges him. I like it because the women love more than one man too and aren’t treated as sluts. I also like that it gives weight to freedom. I like it because he loves one of them to bits because she’s clever.
When people fly on wings of steel (or something like that, near the start… I don’t remember, but it was pretty)
Spoilers below:
I also like that the lead is a bit cuckoo.
Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022), released in Spain as “Tres mil años esperándote”.
The premise is a joke about itself: Alithea (Tilda Swinton) is a narratologist, she studies how stories work for a living. She buys a glass bottle in Istanbul, rubs it, out comes a djinn with Idris Elba’s face who offers her three wishes. And she, who knows the pattern of every tale, knows that in every tale the three wishes end badly. So she says no.
That’s the whole knot: the djinn has to tell her three thousand years of stories to talk her round. The Queen of Sheba, Suleiman the Magnificent, a harem, all of it to get to two people talking in a hotel.
Nice detail: the bottle is Turkish çeşm-i bülbül glass, “nightingale’s eye”, which is where the title of the original story by A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, comes from.
It cost 60 million and made 20. One of the flops of 2022. Reviews were lukewarm (71% on Rotten Tomatoes) and the consensus is more or less that the visuals eat the story.
A film about why we need to tell each other stories that couldn’t find anyone to tell its own to. There’s something there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Thousand_Years_of_Longing