And yes, she unleashes a genie, or djinn, and a giant one at that-the sight of his enormous foot opening her bathroom door is something unusual to be sure-who, upon learning some English, proffers Alithea the standard three wishes. Back in her hotel room, she tries to scrub off an ornamental bottle she picked up at an antique shop. We are to ask, later, whether it was a hallucination or something ancient and real calling to her. The movie will be about emotion, but also about storytelling and stories.ĭuring a lecture Alithea faints after a hallucination.

“She wrote Death on the Nile here,” Alithea is told. Arriving in a storybook-bright Istanbul for a conference, she’s put up in the Agatha Christie room of the Pera Palace Hotel. Introducing herself in voiceover as a “narratologist,” that is, a studier of stories, she cherishes her solitary self-sufficiency. In the case of Alithea, the academic played with traits both prim and feisty by Tilda Swinton, the longing is one she denies.

And very much about the emotion tagged in the title. “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” the new film directed by the protean “Mad Max: Fury Road” creator George Miller, is very much a battleground. Love, hate, action, violence, death, in one word, emotions.” In a much-bruited scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 film “ Pierrot le Fou,” the sui generis American filmmaker Sam Fuller turns up at a party and is asked by Jean-Paul Belmondo to define cinema.

I have lived a thousand years victims