| Australia/Turkey/UK, 2022 | Drama/Fantasy | Author Work | Trailer |
Ever since humans developed a culture of their own, or perhaps even before, storytelling has been there. Stories do not only serve as amazing entertainment, but also can bear further purposes. Expression of feelings and art, lessons hidden within them, knowledge from our past and present… or even the desire to stay: these are all part of the pulsation of our kin to transmit.
But in the end, stories are just very tiny instances, not more than an fugace eyeblink long, of the story of stories that is history. Ultimately, our history and all the events, people, spirits and connotations it carries, has been the mother dough any storymaker from yesterday and today has eaten of. From ancient rhapsodes to modern writers and filmmakers -and even the parent that soothes their child with gentle words and promises of dreams- all of us have been indirectly influenced by our heritage whenever we felt our atavic pulse to narrate.
Three Thousand Years of Longing takes these ideas and mysteries of our kin and concocts them to produce a heart-touching movie that could not have been better at expressing what makes us humans. Taking inspiration -as it could not had been in another way- of a story of stories that are the Arabian Nights, it tells the encounter between a very human djinn in a flask and a doctor in humanistics specialised in narratology (I discovered this discipline precisely with this movie) in such a history-rich setting as is Istambul. The djinn, when the doctor confronts him about his true purpose at offering her the traditional three wishes, starts telling her the story of how he got imprisoned, and the feelings and experiences he underwent meanwhile. Thus, we get small glimpses of the fable of the Queen of Sheba, two real Sultans and their family and a very empathetic female Da Vinci in the dusk of the Ottoman Empire; only for ending witnessing that even fictional beings can be human too -precisely because they are modelled by human storytellers-.
While this prompt, under the management of more frivolous hands, could have resulted in a pile of biomass comparable to Kazaam, the always surprising George Miller and his trusted team have masterfully crafted a movie that discusses and puts our hearts in the mood to understand the importance of stories, and ultimatively history in general. The creative team has definitely done their homework, because even small anthropological details that are true dark horses for the main mass of people are correctly interpreted and depicted in this movie.
Story and history are so deep entwined in Three Thousand Years of Longing that, once we get deep enough within it, we start sensing the heartbeats of one of humankind’s biggest mysteries: love. Please do not get me wrong, I am not referring to the “romantic” love traditional Hollywoodian engines try to shove us through the throat by force, but the pulse that makes us humans seek and interact with others and write a chapter of our personal stories togehter. The stories the djinn tells -and eventually the conclusion of the film- are different manifestations of the pulse of love: Lust and desire, parental love and rejection, admiration, the finding of an affine soul and the excitement to spend a lifetime with them, the sorrowful breaking, the oblivion, and the rediscovery of it.
Love is a powerful, sublime, moving force for any of our kin. It is one of the primitive pulsations that makes us act, and therefore writing our stories. Loving is caring and sharing, but also desiring, jealing, worrying; it fuels our egos and makes us assimilate to something bigger to us, all at the same time. Is not it a wonderful, yet perilious but fascinating force? If we do not love, we stagnate, and our story becomes unfinished.
And this is perfectly extrapolable to the history of our kin. The stories seen in this film, heavily based on real people and events -when they do not retell reality itself- present that, indeed, love in some of its forms, has been the defining source for all good and sad that has happened.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is as mysterious, revealing and wonderful as history, and as fascinating and heart-touching as love. I do not know if anybody that ends watching this fine film will understand humanity better; but as beings of stories and love as we are, I am certainly sure that each audience that patiently and delightfully witnesses what George Miller has concocted this year will get one of the multiple aspects and intentions of what a story and a love are. And if only for that, this film is something we should be grateful for its existence.
And as a history geek, it confirms my stance that after reading reality, fantasy nothing has more to offer to me, as it is just a mirror of it. Love this.