MOVIE: THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING

 

From 2022 starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba.

Swinton is a British scholar, a Narratologist, who during a visit to Istanbul purchases an old glass bottle in a market. Back at the hotel, she cleans it and pops open the top unleashing a Djinn who is 20 feet tall but manages to magically shrink down to 8. Over the course of the day, they tell each other about themselves with Swinton having not much to tell but Djinn recounts three tales of granting wishes, the unforeseen consequences as a result and his three experiences of being trapped in bottles.

An adult fairy tale: what would you do encountering a Djinn? Some nice visuals, interesting segments and good acting from the leads. We've found over the years that Swinton chooses intriguing projects and this is no exception. At the core of the film is love. What people do because of love and passion for another. It doesn't always work out happily ever after. 

It was regarded by the industry as a box office bomb and one wonders how well it was marketed. On one hand, if folks were thinking this was going to be a Disneyesque feature for the kiddies, they were going to be upset (nudity! sex! inter-racial LUV). On the other, if Marvel fans etal thought this was going to be some action film featuring an ass-kicking Genie, they were going to be bitterly disappointed. There is an intellectual vein that runs through this story, pointing back to what Swinton's character does for a living-from Wiki:

"Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. It is an anglicisation of French narratologie, coined by Tzvetan Todorov (Grammaire du Décaméron, 1969). Its theoretical lineage is traceable to Aristotle (Poetics) but modern narratology is agreed to have begun with the Russian Formalists particularly Vladimir Propp  (Morphology of the Folktale, 1928), and Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of  heteroglossia, dialogism and the  chronotope first presented in The Dialogic Imagination (1975).

Cognitive narratology is a more recent development that allows for a broader understanding of narrative. Rather than focus on the structure of the story, cognitive narratology asks "how humans make sense of stories" and "how humans use stories as sense-making instruments".^"

Not your average Hollywood flick, in fact in lesser hands, this would have been a laughable mess. Some critics whined it was slow, whined about the lil white woman lusting for a Big Black Buck trope-go with the flow-it's worth seeing at least on the basis of originality. Available on Prime.