This is exactly how you would have imagined Hermione in 2022: still roaming through libraries and rummaging through books.
The one who pulls one book after the other off the shelf isn't Hermione, it's British actress Emma Watson.
She played this ambitious, intelligent character from the Harry Potter fantasy saga in the films of the same name, a role she will always be associated with.
Caroline O Jebens
Editor in the society department at FAZ.NET.
Follow I follow
And that's why Watson, supposedly unexpectedly like her fictional alter ego, finds a letter herself.
Inside: No invitation to Hogwarts Magic School, but for a reunion of the cast of the film series, the first part of which was released 20 years ago.
For an hour and a half, the actors are back together again on the screens of the Sky streaming platform subscribers.
Harry, Ron, Hermione, Voldemort, Sirius Black, Bellatrix Lestrange, the Weasley family, Luna Lovegood and Neville Longbottom, the Malfoys - they're all there, sitting together on the old movie sets.
Focus on parallels between film and real life
The reunion seems extremely elaborate and lovingly designed - and is disenchanted precisely because of this: important locations in the film are no longer the location of a fantastic event, but just backdrops. Then Harry Potter and his nemesis Bellatrix Lestrange sit in a dungeon and chat a little, because it's actually the now 32-year-old Daniel Radcliffe and the always charismatic Helena Bonham Carter.
The parallels between film and real life are given special focus: Radcliffe, who was not found during the casting, but was "chosen" by Christopher Columbus, who directed the first two films. Or Ron Weasley actor Rupert Grint, who has seven siblings himself, including a red-haired little sister. And Emma Watson, of course, who was "smarter than any adult" on set. And that growing up was real too: Ron's first dance with a woman - Professor McGonagall in the fourth part of the saga - was also Rupert Grint's, just with Dame Maggie Smith.
It is therefore more interesting when those who were otherwise behind the camera now talk about their work, namely the four directors: Columbus, Alfonso Cuarón, Mike Newell and David Yates.
Ultimately, it was she and her film crews who visualized 4,500 pages of young adult novels for eight films.
Each of them had his task: Columbus, who assembled a cast that would last for more than ten years.
Cuarón, who designed a new aesthetic for the filming of the third volume.
Newell, who challenged the young actors' performances in the fourth part.
Yates, who gave a worthy ending to this saga.
Because with the films, four years after the release of the last volume, the whole Potter era that Joanne K. Rowling had created came to an end.
Female authors are not mythical creatures
“The Boy Who Lived” was the name of the famous chapter in the first volume, and this reunion makes it clear: the same cannot be said for the author. It appears only three times in the total of ninety minutes and says little of importance. According to a report by "Entertainment Weekly", it is archive material from 2019, and Rowling is said to have declined an invitation to the reunion. The author of the world's best-selling children's book series has polarized for the past three years with her comments about the place trans people have (or, according to her, shouldn't have) in feminism. Several members of the film cast, including Radcliffe, Watson and Grint, have already distanced themselves from Rowling's statements.
For those who grew up watching Harry Potter in the '90s, what this fictional world means to them can certainly be emotionally separated from the author. But it is also the same generation that would no longer differentiate between the work and the author: thanks to social media, female authors are no longer mythical beings who write their books secluded in the ivory tower. They also tweet and write essays, the rhetoric of which many found at odds with what their work conveyed to them. "You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be!" reads a voice from the off in the middle of the reunion, a motto of Dumbledore's that almost seems like an ironic comment in this context: " They are unable to see that it's not about what someone was born as,but who he becomes.”
Hagrid stays
So it helps that this reunion shouldn't be about Rowling or the books.
It's about the films that brought in €6.7 billion for Warner Brothers and the PR that the Harry Potter universe desperately needs to get audiences for the spin-off series of the very mediocre Fantastic Beasts series.
And yet, when people come together in this way, it's not just because it's exciting to see what has become of everyone, or because it's nice to hear the nostalgic anecdotes.
Because some places remain empty forever.
Alan Rickman, who played Severus Snape, Helen McCrory as Narcissa Malfoy, Richard Harris as the first Albus Dumbledore, Richard Griffiths as Vernon Dursley and John Hurt as the wandmaker Mr. Ollivander: So it is a comfort to know that there is these films exist, as Robbie Coltrane put it touchingly: "If my grandchildren see the films, then unfortunately I won't be there anymore." But Hagrid, he does.