Much has been made of this third filmic installment in the Harry Potter series. We have been told that it is more mature, more complex, darker, more everything really. I went to see it with high hopes but with deep suspicions. I wondered: could Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón transform the enchanted universe of Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) into something mature, complex, nuanced even? Not that the magical quality of Rowling’s universe where trees move, objects are bewitched, and strange mythical creatures swarm, presents any obstacle to mature treatment. The obstacle lies in this universe’s moral sensibility. It is moral in the way that children’s literature has traditionally constructed morality: a simple struggle between the mutually-exclusive clearly-defined forces of good and evil, (or nice and nasty, as they tend to manifest themselves in terms of character). My misgivings stemmed from a suspicion that any maturity, any complexity, could only be cosmetic, and that the supposed transformation of this universe into something different would be more an appearance than a reality.

So what does Cuarón do with J.K. Rowling’s "masterpiece"? To start with, Cuarón re-imagines the Harry Potter universe. For the first hour it rains, for the next it is winter and lightly snows. Cuarón’s attention here seems to be drifting to a focus on aesthetic values more than on character values, or put more precisely, he seems to be investing the film’s emotional resonance and energy in its atmospheric mood. This is not to say that he abandons his prefabricated characters but, as far as their development is concerned, his hands are clearly tied. Harry’s much-touted budding maturity is more sound than sense. The first real kiss between Harry and Hermione (Emma Watson) is still to come. When Chris Columbus directed the first two Harry Potter films I had the impression that he sought to put everything into a form that he believed, (like so many parents and adults before him), children would be able to grasp. Cuarón resists this particular species of over-simplification. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban I was never certain whether Hermione was attracted to Harry or Ron (Rupert Grint). We know, or at least we think we know, that Hermione will end up with Harry, but Cuarón’s direction consciously avoids clarifying this relationship. The difference between Columbus’ treatment of the relationship between Harry, Ron and Hermione, and Cuarón’s stands out sharply when we compare the final scene of Columbus’ Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) with a scene from this film. In Chamber of Secrets, after Hermione has been de-petrified she runs into Hogwarts’ main hall to thank Harry and Ron. She hugs Harry effusively, turns to hug Ron, but shakes hands instead. In Cuarón’s film, when Harry, Ron and Hermione watch what they believe to be the execution of Hagrid’s hippogriff, (a mythic thingymajig that’s half-horse half-eagle), Hermione hugs Ron from one side, and buries her face in his shoulder, while Harry puts his hand around her from the other side. This three-way embrace evokes an almost identical shot from Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (2001), a film which deals with complex ever-shifting sexual relationships, and it functions here to subtly suggest the possibility of a developing love-triangle.

Cuarón’s real achievement in this film then, is the way he has succeeded in blurring the boundaries between characters. And this blurring of boundaries, this smudging of character-edges, occurs not only in the relationships between Harry, Ron and Hermione but also in the ever-present opposition between good guys and bad guys. In Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban this opposition may not exactly be ‘nuanced’ but it is less blatant than in previous films, and Cuarón is heroically swimming against the preordained current here. He is trying to inject a degree of moral ambivalence into a fundamentally black-and-white moral universe. An example of Cuarón’s efforts in this direction can be seen in the film’s obligatory game of Quiddich which takes place in the sobering inclemency of a raging storm: lightening strikes ... a student’s broom ignites and spirals hopelessly out of control ... another gets lost in a threatening cloud ... another, hit by an electric discharge of lightening, plummets furiously groundward. In the previous films Quiddich was a simple embodiment of the struggle between clearly-drawn forces with Harry and his good team arrayed on one side, and Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) and his evil team lined-up on the other. In Cuarón’s Quiddich, anyone, regardless of whether they are the good guys or the bad guys, can be suddenly and unceremoniously zapped by a fearsome electrical discharge of lightning.

Every film positions its audience within a certain ideological perspective. The Harry Potter series requires its viewers to assume and accept a universe in which the boundaries between good and evil are absolute and unambiguous. It is this simplistic moral and moralizing approach that marks Harry Potter as a very conventional kids’ movie in my mind. Cuarón’s Harry Potter is still a kids’ story unfolding in a kids’ universe. But for all that, Cuarón does not always direct it like a conventional kids’ story, that is, he does not always direct it simplistically. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban may be more mature and more complex than the previous Harry Potter films, but it is not that much more. Its most obvious difference, its darker mood, is not even that much darker -- after all Harry and his friends triumph in the end, and if their triumph is a partial triumph, this is only because of the need to leave some narrative threads to take up in the next installment. But by injecting a little moral ambiguity Cuarón has made this Harry Potter film, at least for me, a little more digestible.