At a certain point in their careers, many filmmakers feel that they have reached a crossroads. need remember why they decide to tell stories in the first place, and end up making films that talk about the power of stories. It is, curiously, the same thing that leads many of them to want to make their own version of ‘Pinocchio’ (and that is why we have so many movies of the character).
George Miller, undoubtedly one of the most passionate storytellers and one of the greatest living filmmakers. The Australian is undoubtedly among those incredible scholars of humanity and its behavior from the field of fantasy. And, at times, of extreme fantasy. That is why he has decided to do his own internal review of the pleasure of telling stories with ‘Three thousand years waiting for you’.
Tell me a story
The stories form the skeleton of this his latest film, already available on rental platforms such as Filmin or Apple TV. In it we see Tilda Swinton play a doctor in specialized literature, precisely, in studying mythological and current stories, trying to find common elements that achieve talk about our behavior and life.
On a trip to Istanbul for a conference, he goes through a modest bazaar where he buys an old lamp. From her Her surprise: when rubbed, a giant Idris Elba comes out of it acting as a genie, ready to grant her three wishes. She, of course, is leery, as she’s seen all the stories about genies granting wishes and they all go wrong. Thus, she begins an exchange of perspectives and stories about the nature of desire and the warnings that are hidden behind these stories.
Miller creates an interesting two-way game, trying to impress us with an ambitious and stunning visual display who also seeks to be modest and intimate. The stories told by the genius begin full of fantasy, captured on screen with stunning visual designs and the expected camera movements of a genius who has made ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’.
In between, the moments of the doctor and the genius in a hotel room sharing delicacies while wearing bathrobes are inserted. An important contrast that Miller takes advantage of to develop a human and emotional drama that shows the intense but ineffable connection between these two people (or person and being). The alternation between stories and reality makes for an interesting progression that reinforces Miller’s message about the power of storytelling.
That is one of the most powerful and direct readings that Miller offers in this free adaptation of AS Byatt who has been developing for 20 years with his daughter Augusta Gore. The other is deeper and more humanistic, exploring our disconnect between us as fantasy has been losing weight and place in pursuit of digital noise and polarization (although it gets rid of being technophobe, leaving details that precisely praise technological advances and their way of opening up possibilities).
‘Three thousand years waiting for you’: fly high, go deep
The spectacle that develops in this swing between reality and fantasy that it is quite a shock that the final stretch of the story loses all of this, in a turn of the helm that feels partly deflated or even leads one to think of a lack of closure. Fly so high that you end up not knowing where to land.
But there are ideas that survive at the end, making an ending as atypical as it is acceptable even if it is not wasteful like the previous acts. ‘Three thousand years waiting for you’ is the kind of imaginative proposal that has a lot of interesting to tell about the moment we live in, making it through millennia of history and fantasy. The disdain suffered in its commercial release in theaters was painful and unfair, showing that sometimes we don’t deserve nice things.