David Yates
The cards are on the table, blood flows, the time for ambiguity is over: Voldemort has taken power, and every magician must make his choice. "Now everything will change, is not it?" Said Hermione at the end of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" as sometimes happens in the flow of history, for the protagonists of the series by JK Rowling join now the late teens and one in which the world knows is overthrown from the foundations. 'S why the tragic "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part I" by David Yates opens with a harrowing sequence, and subtly baroque: Hermione casts the spell of memory loss on his Muggle parents, who for their own good be sure to have a daughter, and her image disappears from their framed pictures. At the same time Harry's uncles leave Privet Drive (hurts the film to remove, for obvious reasons of time, one of the most touching episodes of the novel, the departure of Dudley). This puts the beginning of a beautiful and desperate tone of the movie: not great disaster movie scenes (Like the attack on the Millennium Bridge in "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince"), but a cataclysm of the soul.
All this is in the colors of photography Eduardo Serra, gray, sad, depicting a world of ice cream even when Harry and Hermione find themselves safe after escaping from the house-trap Bathilda Bagshot, at the end, the sand, after another lucky escape, while the pain of the death of a friend, the light will be warmer.
The humor of the collective transformation using the Polyjuice Potion in Harry at the beginning of the film, it serves to highlight by contrast the darkness of the atmosphere, ditto for the solemnity of the departure, immediately followed by the battle in the sky. There is a kind of profound fatigue in the movie, not a weakness in the sense of fiction but a melancholy end of the world, in the clashes, which are a brutal matter of survival, it lacks the epic exaltation. Can be expected to return in the grand finale of this Part II, where the beloved Hogwarts becomes the battlefield in flames (there might be an influence on the concept of JK Rowling of Germanic and Götterdämmerung Wagner: Hogwarts as Valhalla). But in this first part there is nothing but doubt, sadness and despair. Hogwarts is not visible (and precisely because of this lack - both in terms of staging and symbolic - there realize less than the age gap between the characters and the actors). The film takes place mostly around (in flight) for an England empty and deserted as a zombie movie.
seems incredible that once the Harry Potter film saga has been a hot children's film where the horror and the danger existed but where, after defeating them, they came back in the cozy family bed of the Great Hall of Hogwarts to take the laurels and gorging on food. At the beginning of "The Deathly Hallows," when the snake Nagini rushes forward to swallow a corpse, pounced to open the jaws against the camera. It 's a sign: a statement that it will discount the audience on the floor of the black story. The page that follows Harry into his house the suit, vacillating Bathilda Bagshot is pure horror film: the living dead, the buzzing of flies (classic sign of the massacre film), the shocking discovery sketches of dried blood on the walls.
Some problems of visual rendering of the pages of the novel are resolved with extreme sharpness in the film by Yates. In the scene of the temptation to Ron, when the Horcrux talk to leverage his sense of inferiority against Harry and his jealousy (including sexual) about Hermione, you see a hallucinatory vision of Harry and Hermione as waxy perfect creatures inhuman and rebuilt the computer here is that the CGI becomes conscious of the narrative form, no longer simple source of special effects (and note the audacity to show naked kissing). Or see the proud and delirious sequence of reading the fable of the Deathly Hallows, made visually through graphic figures unreal, almost in silhouette, of which you can see the skeletal limbs: we are halfway between Lotte Reiniger and Tim Burton.
As in the novel, the domain of the Death Eaters, who took over the Ministry of Magic and start a campaign to eliminate the wizards of Muggle blood, is emerging as a fantasy parallel of Nazism. The film is impressive in this respect thanks to the properties of the film to show their faces. Let me explain: the wizards and witches who come to see Ministry "nazificato" not hanno un aspetto diverso dai film precedenti, e infatti sono gli stessi: per paura o per conformismo sono divenuti collaborazionisti (è la banalità del male di cui ci ha parlato Hannah Arendt). Detto per inciso, e in particolare riguardo a Mrs. Umbridge, più che mai si rimpiange qui che il pacifismo di J.K. Rowling abbia impedito ai suoi eroi positivi di usare la maledizione letale, “Avada Kedavra”; ed è il solito problema della liceità dei mezzi che sorge ogni volta che il bene si confronta contro il male assoluto.
Le carte sono in tavola e ognuno deve fare la sua scelta. Si avvicina la ciclopica battaglia che concluderà il ciclo, e in questo rogo si consumerà - per poi rinascere mostrandoci un mondo purificato - The great saga.
