Some directors are so prestigious they get to make studio movies on the basis of one-for-them-and-one-for-me. George Miller has gone that bit further. He hit a mother lode of fan-acclaim seven years ago with his rebooted action-thriller creation Mad Max: Fury Road, but this new film – in all its oddity, sweetness and indulgence – shows he is now doing one-for-him-and-one-that’s-even-more-for-him. It’s an Arabian Nights-type fantasia which he has clearly been gagging to make for years.
Fury Road was of course very personal as well as colossally successful at the box office: but Three Thousand Years of Longing is such an intensely personal passion project, spectacular yet fey, it would get any other director thrown out of the pitch meeting and beaten up. It’s the movie equivalent of an illuminated manuscript in medieval Latin kept in a safe and allowed to be consulted only by accredited scholars making notes in 8H pencil. And yet at the same time it has the innocent, colourful if weirdly defanged exuberance you’d see in the kind of family movies shown on Christmas TV 30 or 40 years ago.
