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There is not a cynical molecule in the makeup of George Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing, a patient and occasionally dazzling fantasy about love, myth, hope, companionship and perhaps, most of all, about storytelling.
Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, wrapped in plush white bathrobes, will reiterate the storytelling point over and over again during a vulnerable, sprawling conversation in a stately Istanbul hotel suite that's nice enough to make one consider a career in academia.
Though the setting and wardrobe might feel familiar, this story is anything but. Only one of the parties, Swinton's Alithea Binnie, is human. Elba is an immortal djinn, the fancy term for the anglicized "genie," whom Alithea has stumbled upon in a small, striped glass bottle in an unsorted bin of an Istanbul antique store.
In most stories, the ability to suddenly get your heart's desire with a wish comes as good news, at least at first.
But Alithea isn't one who has a list of wants. Not only is she a proud, contented single and child-free woman - she's also a "narratologist" who is so well-versed in mythology that she knows all the ways in which wish-making and granting can go wrong.
And yet by not fulfilling her duty to make three wishes, she also is condemning the djinn to nonexistence.
He tries to convince her otherwise, by telling fantastical stories from his past, spanning some three thousand years, and all the times he was sent back to the bottle for caring too much about the wisher, from Sheba (Aamito Lagum), to a servant who longs for a prince, Gulten (Ece Yuksel), and finally child bride of an old merchant who desires knowledge, Zefir (Burcu Golgedar).
