September 15, 2022
British scholar Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) was in Istanbul, Turkey to deliver a talk about telling stories in a conference. For a souvenir, she bought an antique blue bottle from a shop in the market. When she unplugged the bottle, she released a Djinn (Idris Elba). The magical being offered to grant Alithea three wishes, anything her heart truly desired. Aware of prior stories of wishes gone wrong, Alithea hesitated about making a wish.
To help her decide, the Djinn told her three of his most memorable stories. The first story was about how King Solomon (Nicolas Mouawad) cast the spell to imprison him in a bottle. His second story was about Gulten (Ece Yüksel), a maid who wished to be the lover of Mustafa (Matteo Bocelli), son of Suleiman the Magnificent. His third story was about an intellectually-gifted woman Zefir (Burcu Gölgedar) with whom he fell in love.
This latest film by written and directed by George Miller, the celebrated writer and director of the "Mad Max" franchise, from his feature film debut that made Mel Gibson a star (1979) to its critically-acclaimed, multiple Oscar-winning fourth installment subtitled "Fury Road" (2015). He was also wrote and directed other memorable films, like "Lorenzo's Oil" (1992), "Babe: Pig in the City" (1998), "Happy Feet" (2006) and its sequel (2011).
This was was inspired by A.S. Byatt's 1994 short story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" first published in the Paris Review literary magazine. The first line of Alithea's fairy tale narration "Once upon a time, when (humans) hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea ..." was from the opening line of the short story, but the rest of it was Miller's all the way, written with a charm of his own.
The main bulk of this movie are the stories told by the Djinn to seduce the woman who released him to make her wishes. Being the reliable actors they are, Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba both gave their characters a distinct idiosyncratic likability which make the viewers empathize with them. The Djinn's weird tales themselves may not always be as engaging in themselves, but Miller's compelling visuals always held our attention rapt. 7/10.
No comments:
Post a Comment