We tell ourselves stories in order to live – or, if you're Australian director George Miller, to smash up post-apocalyptic monster trucks, put a witchy Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer into a duel with the devil, or have computer-generated penguins shimmy and shake to a jukebox of pop bangers.
If anyone can rescue Joan Didion's maxim from the clutches of earnest literary types, it's the director of Mad Max, a man whose career has tangled with primal myth and metaphor at every turn.
For all the breathless, breakneck action of Miller's most celebrated work, it's his films' fable-like qualities that make them resonate – one of the reasons that his maligned Beyond Thunderdome, for example, with its eerie passages of dream-time storytelling, remains one of his most memorable movies (at least to this writer).
Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing, starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba and based on A.S. Byatt's 1994 short story The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, is all about the stories we tell, and it's no less ambitious than the rest of the director's body of work; a romantic fantasy that promises a sweeping tale of human love and desire across time.
How close it comes to achieving those goals might depend on your tolerance for two people – even movie stars like Swinton and Elba – yakking in a hotel room in bathrobes for an hour-and-a-half. Far from the epic fantasy freak-out suggested by the film's trailers, Miller's latest is a rather modest two-hander concerning lonely souls drawn together by their need to tell stories – a narrative punctuated by extended vignettes of occasional vim and virtuosity.
Continuing in her welcome exploratory performance mode after what feels like decades of mannered quirk, Swinton plays Alithea Binnie, a British literary scholar – a narratologist, to be precise – who specialises in stories and myth. She's alone, but happy – or so, as these stories tend to go, she thinks.
In Istanbul to attend a conference, Alithea buys an antique bottle from the Grand Bazaar and uncorks Elba's Djinn, a metaphysical beefcake in pointy orc ears and the rippled, digitally painted-on ye olde bike shorts of ancient myth (no doubt to the delight of a very specific group of fetishists).
The Djinn is handy for whipping up a tasty breakfast plate and communing with electronic devices – he's made of electromagnetic material, a kind of meta-human transmitter – and also, of course, for granting those three fabled wishes that make any genie worth their weight.
Problem is, Alithea is perfectly content: she doesn't wish for anything, and what's more, being an expert in ancient stories, she doesn't trust that this shapeshifting hunk isn't a trickster out to ensnare her.
"There's no story about wishing that doesn't end up a cautionary tale," she reasons (and no, she's not talking about Guy Ritchie's dreadful Aladdin).
Instead, the Djinn tells stories of how he came to be — tales that journey from a time of Biblical myth, where he was once the doomed lover of the impossibly regal Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), to Turkey, where he romanced Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar), the lowly but gifted wife of an overbearing merchant. (Turns out the Djinn, like so many dudes, was an accomplished lover but a crummy boyfriend.)
Three Thousand Years of Longing is an odd little movie — so much so that its mere existence in the franchise-dominated multiplex landscape might be applauded.
Its tales are clearly designed to tap into ancient storytelling and find resonance with contemporary culture, pitting myth and metaphor against modern science and technology. In one of the movie's neat ripples, the Djinn's electromagnetic powers make him a kind of forebear of smart devices, capable of absorbing and adapting to sound and vision (the film's sonics, courtesy Australian sound designer James Ashton, are routinely absorbing).
Yet the stories nested within the overarching narrative don't always engage, their gaudy digital fantasias – by turns grotesque and uninspired – failing to generate the romantic sparks to which they aspire.
Meanwhile, Swinton and Elba yammer – and yammer some more – about the nature of stories, a dynamic that starts to resemble less a pleasurable two-hander than stagy exposition.
It also highlights the risks whenever a filmmaker attempts to mount an 'adult fairytale': bang on about your themes too much and they tend to swamp the power of the imagery, which is often best left to the unshaped subconscious. (What I wouldn't give for a reel of the director's unhinged Babe: Pig in the City imagery to be dropped into the middle of this.)
Still, as with all things Miller, there's no doubting the sincerity and soul in the engine, together with a playful sense of mischief – and wacky grandeur – that almost wins you over in the film's final stretch.
By the time Elba's phantom spirit is re-materialising and kicking magic soccer balls (oh for the Djinn football movie that could have been), the film has all but landed its thesis – or at least opened its heart in ways that make it impossible to dismiss.
What is science, the film correctly wonders, but today's version of myth, mankind's desire to tell itself stories in a hopeless bid to make sense of the universe?
Like a true romantic, Miller's movie prefers to put its faith in love as a way of rescuing its characters from their existential oblivion. If only the storytelling was as consistently lofty as that sentiment.
Three Thousand Years of Longing is in cinemas now.
