As a globalist, anti-racist, anti-white love story about equity and shame, this fairy tale falls flat.
Equity — the current regime’s reverse-racism initiative to bring about reckoning, reconciliation, and reparations between the black and white races — proves to be the undoing of the baroque political fantasy Three Thousand Years of Longing.
Despite an extravagantly romantic title, the film’s fantasy love story between pale British scholar Alithea (Tilda Swinton) and a dusky genie she releases from a bottle, who calls himself the Djinn (Idris Elba), cannot overcome the cultural differences between a slave’s desire for freedom and a globalist master’s self-pity.
If you wondered why last year’s The Power of the Dog, a neo-western set in the United States rather than director Jane Campion’s New Zealand home turf (because casting aspersions on America is always easy), 3K Years raises similar suspicions. Othering the new Other is its way of apologizing for imperialism. Australian director George Miller buffers some of that shame by adapting a 1994 short story by British author A. S. Byatt. 3KY is set at an international literary conference in Turkey, where Alithea shops for souvenirs and unknowingly purchases an ancient blue bottle encasing the genie, a male Scheherazade who disrupts her loneliness and enchants her with deep-voiced reminiscences of his storied past.
Despite Miller’s visual panache — when’s the last time a seraglio was depicted on the big screen? — these anecdotes are ultimately as unsatisfying as Campion’s Dog. Opulently designed to favor the Orient, they traduce British and Australian cultural identity. Each of the subsequent unfolding subplots distracts from the initial fascination of Alithea and the Djinn’s male–female, white–black, New World–Old World, intellectual–sensual contrasts. When self-proclaimed narratologist Alithea fails to offer tales of her own — she never even ponders how Western legends might have borrowed from Eastern myths — this $60 million production seems hobbled by its makers’ own racial and anthropological embarrassment.
All the great Arabian Nights movies — from Douglas Fairbanks’s silent The Thief of Bagdad in 1924 to Alexander Korda’s glorious, full-color Thief of Bagdad (1940) to Ray Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Karel Zeman’s animated A Thousand and One Nights (1974) — delighted in fairy-tale exoticism tickling our modern practicality. But 3KY’s equity perspective is guilt-ridden. Alithea embodies the onus of the modern, white West — her globalist yearning rejects religion. (“What else do we require of gods now? All lose their purpose and are reduced to metaphor.”) She is faithless and dour, while the Djinn is monumental. Released from that bottle, he fills her hotel room and overwhelms her.
Miller juxtaposes the two via visual, racial emphasis. The Djinn’s dark-skinned presence — first smoke, then flesh — is brown, gold-tinged, black, blue, and iridescent with a sensual patina. He has elfin ears, one ragged like a torn leaf, and his open hands reveal Henna-red palms. This storybook appearance is more impressive than Elba’s drab acting. And Swinton’s usual intellectual vigor seems dissipated. Unlike the Djinn’s symbolic remembrance of all European knowledge held in multihued bottles, she is colorless.
For those who saw Swinton explore existential crisis in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, 3KY doesn’t measure up. And Miller seems similarly stumped by demonstrating equity to mean the deracination of whiteness. This “anti-racist” fashion is no doubt responsible for the film’s excessive artifice. The digital colors are samey, like the pseudo-myths in The Life of Pi. Ancient history lacks the subtle sumptuousness of Bertolucci’s Little Buddha. Miller’s fantasy of Oriental decadence misses the wondrous humor of his Babe: Pig in the City.
The Djinn embodies Millennial condescension. His physical magnificence only emphasizes his pathos. He tells of being “three times incarcerated, a pawn in the ceaseless game of power” — as if directly from the BLM handbook. Miller cannot remedy Byatt’s upper-class patronization, which relies upon a eunuch hero with no phallus, just a mermaid’s mound. 3KY falls apart when Alithea brings her black lover to London, where they encounter neighborhood racial prejudice and the Covid lockdown. I admire how critic Garo Nigoghossian summed up this nonsensical globalist romance: “He does shows up every few years for a booty call and she’s fine with that because most older liberal white women have no self-worth because of all the wrong decisions they made throughout their lives.”
Miller is a talented tradesman but prone to less than inspired taste, going from the exciting, fanciful Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome to the ridiculous, overwrought Mad Max Fury Road. Too bad Miller traded his gift for modern fantasy for pseudo-historical fantasy. The race reckoning of 3KY’s unequal love story is nothing more than extravagant political hackwork.
