A fairy tale from a bottle – Newspaper Kommersant No. 163 (7364) of 09/06/2022

Released this week is George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Wishing, a fantasy adaptation of Antonia Byatt’s novella The Genie in the Nightingale’s Eye, starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. Tells Yulia Shagelman.

The name of the Mad Max franchise, his most striking achievement, captivated the audience with the roar of motorcycle engines and the romance of post-apocalyptic roads back in the 1980s, has forever stuck to the name of George Miller. In 2015, Miller returned with a surprise sequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, packed with even more speed, adrenaline and high-octane madness – the film looked like both the creators and the audience (to their absolute delight) were hallucinating while inhaling gasoline fumes. . Now Miller is working on a prequel, and an unexpected exit from the road rolled by the inhabitants of a terrible technogenic future somewhere on the territory of the Thousand and One Nights, transferred to our time, may seem strange. But after all, in addition to Mad Max, Miller also shot, for example, The Witches of Eastwick (1987), and the continuation of the story of Babe the pig with his adventures in the big city (1998) – and even though they didn’t cause much audience enthusiasm, but at least these films show that the director himself is not at all alien to the rare genre of the modern fairy tale.

Fairy tale, history, myth, legend and how they are transmitted from one person to another, from one generation to the next, how they capture the passage of time, how they themselves change with it – these are the main plots of “Three Thousand Years of Desires” (to which, since we are talking about a fairy tale, of course, love is added). No wonder the main character of the film, Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton), is a narratologist professor, a world-class expert in the analysis of stories. Her voice starts the story: my story is true, she says, but you’d rather believe me if I tell it like a fairy tale. These words immediately set the tone of the film, ironically emphasize the unreliability of the narrator, but at the same time exhort the viewer to abandon skepticism and immerse themselves in the beauty of images and plot intricacies completely thoughtlessly.

Alithea, who has long preferred comfortable solitude and scientific studies to romantic adventures (it’s much easier to read about them in the studied texts), arrives in Istanbul for the next conference. Her entire stay here is lined with familiar routes: the airport, the hotel where she is placed in the same room where Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express, the university auditorium. This time, however, her academic calmness is slightly disturbed from the very beginning: the specialist in fairy tales sees fairy-tale creatures everywhere, which no one else notices, which makes her head spin in the most literal sense. However, the planned schedule is unshakable, and after the lecture, Alithea goes on an obligatory visit to the Grand Bazaar. There, in the shop of a familiar seller, among all sorts of antique curiosities, she discovers an unsightly glass bottle, which immediately sinks into her soul with something. The next morning, Alithea tries to clean it of soot, starts rubbing too hard and …

You don’t have to be a narratologist to guess what’s going to happen next. A genie appears from the bottle in the form of a huge Idris Elba, occupying the entire room, reports that he has been imprisoned for many hundreds of years, and offers Alithea to fulfill her three wishes in exchange for her freedom. But you can’t fool a scientist: she knows perfectly well that such a narrative usually does not end well for the one who shares his desires. And she has nothing to wish for – she already has everything she needs. The genie is somewhat discouraged by this approach, but does not give up: he shrinks to still large, but not threatening the hotel with dimensions and decides to tell Alithea his story. It will contain the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, Suleiman the Magnificent and Murad IV, palaces, sands and seas, magic potions, camel caravans, wars and scientific discoveries, secrets and spells. Well, love, of course.

The story of the genie, in which there is a place for both romance and humor (sometimes rather rough, as it should be in an old fairy tale), and sadness, flows smoothly and, despite the fact that all the twists and turns in it are well known to anyone who has ever heard at least once in their life one fairy tale (Alitea, of course, it is not difficult to predict some of them), is still fascinating. The fantastic nature of the plot and circumstances, given initially, allows Miller not to strive for ethnographic accuracy – he unfolds on the screen the world of the magical East, which has never existed in reality, inhabited by visible and invisible spirits and luxurious beauties from the Sultan’s harems.

But hidden in this visual splendor, and not even too deep, are reflections on serious issues – freedom of choice, fear of everything alien and incomprehensible, the boundaries beyond which desire turns into violence, and the rejection of desires into apathy and indifference. Miller, like Scheherazade, wraps eternal themes into a form that is captivating enough to make you want to listen to him again and again. Despite all the peals of post-colonial criticism, the good old Western Orientalism once again turns out to be an indispensable magic tool for mass culture.