Cinema | Magical Sisters 2: The men can lie down again

Sandra Bullock (l.) as Sally Owens and Stockard Channing as Aunt Frances in a scene from "Magic Sisters 2" Photo: dpa/Warner Bros Perhaps the best trick of the "Practical Magic" series is still that the big hetero romance is reliably constructed, but the man associated with it is just as reliably removed from circulation - because he is dead, cursed or in a coma. I'm "Magical Sisters" Ultra. I love Alice Hoffman, the author of the four-part Practical Magic book series, and have read her more obscure books. If I were to become demented at some point, I could still whistle the soundtrack score. Sandra Bullock's hair as Sally Owens was always hair goals for me, and if I were rich I wouldn't tell anyone, but there would be signs (I would recreate the Owens women's house).

Of course I was excited when “Practical Magic 2” was announced. Of course I rushed to the cinema preview at the first opportunity. And of course I didn't watch a screener on my laptop beforehand, because watching "Practical Magic" on a 13-inch screen would have been too undignified even for me.

And I found him adorable. For two hours, I got pretty much exactly what I was hoping for from a reunion with the Owens women: the slightly cranky feeling of watching a family being a family that you've been wanting to marry into for decades.

For anyone who hasn't been there since 1998, the plot is told quickly: The Owens women come from a centuries-old family of witches who are under a rather inconvenient curse - any man with whom one of them falls seriously in love must sooner or later die. The first film was therefore only superficially about romantic love and actually about how the sisters Sally and Gillian Owens save each other. In part two, the story continues with Sally's daughters and the next generation of the family.

Nadia Shehadeh is a sociologist and lives for pop absurdities and decorative junk.

The reactions to the second part have been mixed so far. Some people publicly estimate Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman's age, as if one had to apologize for visibly or invisibly getting older. The others celebrate exactly what people wanted to return to the Owens women for after almost thirty years: the chemistry between Bullock and Kidman, the reunion with the aunts, the next generation of witches and that strange mix of melancholy, comfort and female chaos that made the first film so special. Above all, I celebrate the fact that »Practical Magic 2« achieves the feat of telling a love story in which male protagonists only appear peripherally. 

As a reminder, in case it's lost: Ever since Alice Hoffman invented them in 1995, The Owens Women have been about sisterhood, about grief, about the question of what holds a family together when the environment marks them as scary, strange or simply too feminine. And about a curse that kills any man who falls in love with an Owens woman - which, with a wink, could easily be read as the most honest pop culture statement on the institution of heterolove that the nineties produced. Men do exist in this world; they are loved, desired, married and mourned. They just have a remarkable habit of subsequently dying, being cursed, disappearing, or, like now, falling into a coma for a long period of time. And perhaps that is the special magic of the “Practical Magic” series.

Alice Hoffman formally does much of what a conventional heterosexual love story requires. There is great love, desire, loss, the one person without whom you supposedly cannot live. But surprisingly often, the man who is needed for all of this is no longer there when the actual story begins. Romantic love provides the occasion, but the women get the action. One could almost say that the Hetenplot is the Trojan horse of “Practical Magic”: From the outside, everything looks like a story about whether a woman finds the right man or loses; and as soon as you roll the thing into the house, sisters, aunts, mothers, daughters, witches, family secrets and several generations of female trauma tumble out.

This fits pretty closely with what Alice Hoffman herself says about her story. “Practical Magic” is actually more of a story about sisterhood than a love story. That's exactly how books and films work: the romantic drama can be big, but it's actually just background noise that could be left out.

This is also notable because “Practical Magic” as a franchise is already a bit of an anomaly. Hoffman is an enormously productive writer who has published dozens of novels since the 1970s, many of which are no longer available or are difficult to obtain today - and "Practical Magic" didn't initially look like it would become a pop culture universe in 1998. The film adaptation was destroyed by critics, disappointed at the box office and only then developed via VHS, DVD, television and ever new generations of viewers into what is now known as a cult.

Of all things, a film about two sisters, their aunts, a female witch dynasty and a bunch of men who are either dead or, better yet, not around for too long, turned out to be the long-lasting part of the story. Today there are four Owens novels, a second movie, and a fan base that has waited nearly thirty years to return to this house. It wasn't the outrageous love plot that kept "Practical Magic" alive for decades, but rather a world of women that was big enough to eventually outgrow it.

Sure, you could argue that that's still an astonishing amount of love shit for a world full of women who can literally do magic. And of course that's true. But perhaps that's precisely where the elegance of the construction lies: love doesn't have to disappear for the man to disappear from the center. The Owens women are allowed to love, desire, marry and mourn without their relationships becoming subplots. The man can even be the love of her life - and still be dead for the next ninety minutes.

Of course, the Owens women wouldn't even need this romantic framework because their actual dramatic tension has long existed. In “Practical Magic 2,” for example, she lies between a mother who magics away her own feelings out of fear of the curse, and a daughter who is in danger of breaking because of this precisely because no one has taught her how to deal with uncontrolled emotions. That's enough material for two hours, it's psychologically richer than any bedside scene. The man is still allowed to be there – or rather be in a coma – while the more interesting story happens around him. The Owens world isn't too small without men.

And perhaps that's why the heterosexual plot in "Practical Magic" isn't a disturbing remnant in an otherwise radically female story, but rather its Trojan horse: great heterosexual love is everywhere, only men are surprisingly rare. They are loved, longed for and mourned, but most of the time they are long dead, disappeared, cursed or lying in a coma somewhere while the Owens women make up the story among themselves. So the love story can stay - but the man doesn't necessarily have to be there for it. And honestly, maybe this is the most practical magic of all.

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