This post contains spoilers without any masking so if you have not seen this movie, stop reading now.
I enjoyed Monsieur Ibrahim. But there were a couple of things that puzzled me. There are no answers in the back of the book, but maybe you have an interpretation you’d like to share.
Whence big brother Pauli? The father talked about him all the time. Then when the mother shows up on the scene, she says, “Moses was my first child.” Not, “Moses was my only child.” This leaves open the question of who were the children after Moses, if any. And was Pauli a younger brother? Or a fantasy son completely made up by the father?
Do you think the mother knew that it was really Moses all along? If so, she didn’t try very hard to reconcile with him. Why would she bother to show up if she wasn’t going to make the effort to deal with what she should have expected to be a difficult situation?
Did Ibrahim know his wife was dead before he returned to Turkey? He talks about her throughout the film as if she’s back home, but was that just wistful? Or did he not know she had died until he returned to his village?
Why did he put Moses out of the car? Did he flip that sucker on purpose, or was he just a bad driver? Or did he feel like he just had lived out his life and wanted to choose the time & place of his death? If the accident was truly accidental, why would he make Moses get out?