I finally got around to watching Three Thousand Years Of Longing. Which I thoroughly enjoyed - Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba are always worth watching, and I enjoyed the recreations of the Djinn’s stories, especially as they weren’t bowdlerized or reshaped to Western tastes.
But I knew it would be difficult to approach the film in an objective manner, as it was heavily based on one of my favorite works of literature, A.S. Byatt’s luminous novella The Djinn In The Nightingale’s Eye.
To be fair to the filmmakers, they caught much of the novella’s tone - the exoticism and fantasy of the Djinn’s stories, counterpoised with Alithea’s cautious, seemingly prosaic Englishness; his fondness for “the conversation of women”; her disciplined but intense life of the mind. And it follows the beats of the story - a literary scholar (in the novella, she’s called Dr. Gillian Perholt) attends a scholarly conference in Istanbul, in company with her friend and colleague Orhan; she buys an old bottle glass bottle in the market, and when she runs it under hot water in her hotel room, it opens to release a djinn, who at first literally fills the room, before shrinking himself down; he rapidly learns English and offers Gillian the traditional three wishes; and she, knowing how such things go, asks him his story as she considers her wishes. And his stories are true to Byatt’s depiction, even to such grotesqueries as Ibrahim’s fetish for making love to obese women in a sable-lined room. So far, so good.
Nevertheless, the film was the Djinn’s story, the story of his three thousand years of longing; for freedom, for companionship, for, indeed, conversation. He’s a charming but conflicted being, curious but troubled.
The novella, on the other hand, is very much more Gillian’s tale. Indeed, she doesn’t meet the Djinn until halfway through the story. Before that, the story explores her mind and heart, talking about her work, her imagination, her interior life. Her growing fear of her mortality; as in the film, she sees a spectre in the audience of a lecture. Rather than a threatening ifrit, though, she is frozen by a vision of a formless, decaying woman, an apparition of her own approaching senescence. Her encounter with another, possible djinn who leads her through an archeological museum (the strange little man who attempts to take Alithea’s luggage in the airport is, I think, an echo of this encounter). Her interactions with Orhan and his students.
And her first conversation with the Djinn, in the Istanbul hotel, is much more that, a conversation, than their interactions in the film. We learn as much about Gillian’s history as we do the Djinn’s.
Ah, well. Different media, different interpretations. Overall, I enjoyed the film; but I would have liked to have seen more of Alithea’s story.