Chamber drama with a twist: When Idris Elba came out of the bottle

by time news

George Miller, the genius director behind “Mad Max: Fury Road” (and the three films that preceded it), “Babe”, “Move Your Legs” and “Lorenzo’s Oil”, is currently shooting “Fiorosa”, the prequel to “Rage Road”, one of the best action movies of all time. But Miller – a doctor by training, who takes long breaks between his films and who changes direction every few years – likes to vary with smaller films between his giant films. And so the medical drama “Lorenzo’s Fat” was a surprise after three “Mad Max” films and now he is bringing “3,000 Years of Longing” to the screen, as a project he has been dreaming of for 20 years, which was produced in the midst of the corona closures in Australia, and which is on a smaller scale than the films he Do before and after.

This is a family project: the film was written by Miller with his daughter from his first wife, and the film was edited by his second wife, and is dedicated to his other two children. It begins interestingly and even brilliantly: Tilda Swinton plays a literary researcher named Alithea (truth in Greek) who breaks down stories and myths and takes the magic out of ancient folk tales. In Alithea’s world, the stories and myths were meant to explain the mysteries of human existence to the people of the old world, and today’s science has rendered them redundant. Stories about non-existent creatures, who over the years have become the fantasy heroes of cinema and comics. But then, while visiting Istanbul, and as if to teach the heroine that her research is wrong, she encounters a genie – one that comes out of a bottle and grants three wishes. The genie (or the jinn, in its Arabic version) is played by Idris Elba.

In an amusing twist on a chamber drama, almost the entire joint plot dealing with the encounter between the woman and her genie takes place in one hotel room, one morning, with both wearing bathrobes. But then the Genie begins to tell her three stories, and here Miller becomes Terry Gilliam for a moment and creates his “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen”, tales from ancient times, which begin with the meeting of King Solomon with the Queen of Sheba and continue to the days of the Ottoman Empire. The woman, an expert on ancient texts, is skeptical. She knows that stories of demons and wishes never end well. He, for his part, is eternally optimistic and reluctantly, in search of freedom and love. She is the brain, he is the heart, and they are both lonely. “Let’s pass our loneliness together”, she suggests to him, looking for another ending to the story that has already been told.

The posters announce that this is the new film from the director of “Mad Max”, but in fact – in the combination of the domestic and the wonderful, “3,000 years of longing” is most reminiscent of Miller’s “The Witches of Eastwick”, both films that are partly fantastic and partly puzzling, but both have enough vision of an unexpected creator who does not work in Stanz and produces projects that only he can do.

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