Maelle · Reels
Eight films, 2001 to 2011A Pirated DVD and a Pink Gown
The first four
The last four
I met Harry Potter twice. The first time did not count.
That was 2010 or 2011, the first two films, and I was too small to understand a single thing that was happening. Wizards, a castle, a boy under a staircase. It went past me and left nothing behind.
The second time was fifth grade, and it arrived as a DVD from my friend Hridon. Every film, all eight of them, dubbed in Hindi. Four, five and seven were scratched and would not play properly, glitching and stuttering through scenes I had to guess at. I watched them anyway. I watched all of them anyway.
That is how I fell in love with it. Not in a cinema. On a disc that barely worked.
A letter arrives at Privet Drive, then a hundred letters, then a thousand, until they come down the chimney like snow. A wall at King's Cross that a boy is told to run at. A hat that argues with you before it decides who you are.
Then a car that flies badly, a chamber under the school, and a bird made of fire.
Prisoner of Azkaban
The third film is the one that changes the light. Everything goes colder and older. A map that knows where everyone is standing. A lesson in a tower full of crystal balls where nobody is learning anything. A hippogriff that has to be bowed to before it will let you near.
And a man who turns out not to be the monster he was sold as, standing on a hillside with the boy he should have raised.
Goblet of Fire, which is the one
This is the film I love, and I have gone back to it more times than any sensible person would admit.
A cup spits blue fire and names three champions, then names a fourth. Dragons. Grindylows dragging you down into black water. A graveyard at the end of it where the story stops being a school story and becomes something else, and a man with no nose comes back into the world.
It is the competition I love, and it is Hermione. She is the mother of that film. She carries both boys through it, worries for them, patches them up, tells them what they should already know. Neither of them would survive the year without her and neither of them says so.
And then there is the staircase and the ball.
She comes down in a pink gown with her hair pinned up and the film simply stops to look at her. In the book the dress is periwinkle blue. The costume designer made it pink for the screen, and I am glad she did, because that is the frame that has stayed with me for more than a decade.
I had a massive crush on Emma Watson back in those days. There is no more sophisticated way to say it and I am not going to invent one.
Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince
A boy on trial in a room full of adults who have decided in advance. A woman in pink who is worse than any dark wizard because she has paperwork. A secret army learning to defend itself in a room that only appears when you need it.
A girl who can see the horses pulling the carriages, because she has watched someone die.
Then Slughorn's potions class, Hermione's hand going up out of habit, and Dumbledore in the rain looking at Harry like a man doing arithmetic he already knows the answer to.
A long table at Malfoy Manor with every wrong person sitting at it. Three brothers told in shadow puppets. Two friends on a hillside with nowhere left to go.
Snape holding Lily and making a sound I have never forgotten.
Then a bridge, three people standing in the dust of a school that is still smoking, and a wand snapped in half by a boy who no longer wants it.
The lights going down
Something happens across the eight films that you only see if you watch them close together, the way I did.
They all get older. Every film, the three of them have grown a little, and you can see it. But the rooms grow older with them. In Philosopher's Stone everything is bright and shining and warm, a school at Christmas with candles in the air. By the second film the light has dropped. By the third the sky is permanently overcast. By the eighth there is almost no colour left at all, just grey stone and smoke and fire.
Nobody announces it. It happens one film at a time, so slowly that you do not notice until you go back to the beginning and find how yellow and golden it used to be.
And somewhere near the end of Order of the Phoenix it stops being atmosphere and starts being a mood. The films get depressing. You can feel it sitting in the corners of scenes.
Deathly Hallows Part One is where it lands hardest. Harry, Hermione and Ron are just gone, out in fields and forests with no school, no adults, no plan. Nowhere to be. It felt wrong to watch, and I think that was the point.
Every single one of them
Hats off
I still wonder how one human mind built all of this. J.K. Rowling wrote a world with a working economy, a sport, a legal system, a school timetable and a war, and then made you care more about a boy's dead parents than about any of it.
And the acting. Every single one of them, from Harry down to characters who get four lines. Luna Lovegood. Hermione Granger. Albus Dumbledore. Severus Snape. Sirius Black. Remus Lupin. Rubeus Hagrid. Minerva McGonagall. Lucius Malfoy. Draco Malfoy.
A scratched DVD, dubbed into a language I was still learning, half of it unwatchable.
I have watched it all again since, clean and in English and in order. It has never been better than it was on that disc.
Maelle 005 · End of entry