At the end, Wadjda rides her bike toward the highway where cars are speeding by. She stops and looks left and right at the cars and smiles. I thought this was a subtle reference by the film maker that the girl, having won the small victory of owning and riding a bicycle, now looked forward to someday driving a car.
shareI think the implication was more subtle than that. Notice that the boy is no longer in the frame. She's outraced him to the point that he's no longer even visible. Her slow, dusty street opens up to a bustling highway and she has a choice of directions to move in.
I think the implication is that she will leave the culture and "modernize" on the faster paced , liberated roads of a Western life. And, while her friend seemed to be genuinely in love with her, she's seen what happened to her mother who was in much the same position earlier in life. She's not going to live a life predetermined by a man.
Notice also that when he "proposes" she smirks and walks away. I took that to mean that she's rejecting him.
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Call them ISIL. Isis is an overloaded term that has many other legitimate uses.
But how would a Saudi girl accomplish any of those things? It's impossible unless there's a big change in the rules.
shareI like Afrogeek's interpretation, and while you're right to query how possible that may or may not be, it feels like it would chime with her own expectations of what comes next. She's got the bike, she's got some freedom off the back of that and now it's all hers for the taking.
Maybe she will find herself in the same boat as her mother, we can't tell, but right there, at that moment, she was - at least in her own eyes - at the top of the world.
It's a great ending, full of hope.
But how would a Saudi girl accomplish any of those things? It's impossible unless there's a big change in the rules.
...looked forward to someday driving a car.
While she would "like" perhaps to do these things, the sad and pathetic reality is that in Saudi Arabia, women can't even leave the house without a male family member accompanying them. I don't see how she is going to leave her culture behind for the western world as some are suggesting.
shareI don't see how she is going to leave her culture behind for the western world as some are suggesting.