so water has had a long-standing tradition of being used to represent desire and sexuality, almost as much as being used to signify freedom, both interpretations which can be found in dina duma's sisterhood and antonela kostelijević's murina. dealing with teenage girls coming of age in a patriarchal balkan society, both of the protagonists of these movies seek refuge in the water and find themselves transformed by it.
The protagonist of Sisterhood, Maja is a shy 15 year-old living with her single mom and younger sister in Skopje, N. Macedonia, in an environment full of familial tension and loud, binge-drinking peers. She uses her swimming lessons to escape the reality of her parents' divorce, her lack of sexual experience in a social economy that treats it as currency, and the expectations to grow up coming from her domineering best friend, Jana.
In contrast, Julija, the protagonist of Murina, is completely isolated from her peers and the machinery of adolescent social mores. Living with her demure, submissive mother and her aggressive no-nonsense father on a remote Croatian island, she is a modern Rapunzel story, trapped in paradise in the middle of the Adriatic. In one of the first scenes in the movie, we see her gaze out wishfully at the rich foreign tourists lounging on the boat anchored next to her house.
Both movies open with scenes of the protagonists swimming. For Maja, the Matka lake, and for Julija, the Adriatic sea, are immediately presented as the natural environment for our main characters. While the rest of the characters thrive on land, they thrive in the water.
For Maja, the sexual awakening comes in the form of a classmate at school, for whom she jumps of a steep rock in the Matka canyon* at the dare of Jana. However, despite this brave move landing her an invitation to a house party, she refuses to have sex with him there but instead lies to Jana that she did. In turn, Jana uses this information to manipulate Maja later on, doubting the truth of it and threatening to reveal that Maja is still a virgin.
*I have yet to go to Matka which is a disgrace I know, but I really admire the horror movie quality this movie brought to it which I would've never imagined otherwise. Several shots of the walkway made me think of Pearl.
Likewise, Julija first encounters desire upon meeting a friend from her father's youth, a charming older man named Javier that her father wants to convince to buy a property on one of the islands and build a resort there. Javi is charming, artistic, funny, and most of all, supportive of Julija's dreams, something her father isn't. He brings her gifts such as the swimsuit from New York to replace her torn one at home. While Javi paints the sheltered Julija idyllic scenes of going to Harvard on a diving scholarship, her father orders her to stay in the house and not go outside lest she ruins his plans by talking.
The patriarchy is an omnipresent dark cloud in the lives of these characters. After her unsuccessful cherry popping, Maja and Jana stumble upon one of their classmates, a girl they dislike, giving Maja's crush a blowjob. Jana records it and dares a reluctant Maja to post it on instagram as revenge for her crush. She does but it does not have the intended effect. The girl is ridiculed and the guy celebrated for what he did, stoking Maja's resentment that she betrayed her values for nothing.
Indeed, Julija faces much of the same fate on her island. If not told by her father to keep quiet and out of sight, she's admonished by her mother for provoking him and not being "understanding" enough to forgive his outbursts. In a particularly jarring scene, Julija advises against a fool-hardy maneuver of passing through a rocky channel while sailing with her father, mother and Javi, despite her dad insisting he can make it. She reminds him that they already sank one boat before while attempting it. As a reward, her father pushes her off the boat into the sea, leaving her behind while they sail away. Luckily, Javi jumps after her to make sure she's okay but as we find out later on, unfortunately he's not always there.
Water's transformative power reaches its peak in both of the films' second acts. While peeing in the bushes at an outdoor party (a personal adolescent experience i've never been happier to see depicted on film), Jana and Maja are jumped by the very girl they filmed a couple of days before. She is delirious with anger and grief over them ruining her life and in the scuffle that follows, someone pushes someone and the girl splashes in the dark waters of Lake Matka. They call after her but she never answers back.
In Murina, after a failed deep-diving exercise with Javi (with whom Julija shares the passion) and her mother (who's trying to vicariously relive her youth through her daughter), the tension is high on the boat back. Julija accuses her mother, who left the deep diving exercise because she was scared, of trying to ruin her life because she already ruined her own by marrying her father. He hears this and upon the return home, locks her in the basement with no food and electricity, telling her "if you are going to behave like an animal, you are going to be treated like one."
I wish I could say either of these predicaments were unfamiliar to me but they're not. I might have had the fortune of being spared by them but I've heard of many who were not. Women's lives across the Balkans get destroyed every day with a careless post, joke, remark. The actress who played the main role in Murina even said that people were asking them why they made a movie about "a normal family", such is the normalized mistreatment of women.
After the uncertainty of the girl's fate, Jana decides that both her and Maja will stay quiet and pretend they don't know anything. Despite her unwillingness to do so, Maja keeps lying to her parents and even the police about what she saw, and potentially did. Faux concern for the girl who was ridiculed a week ago is shared through performative actions like sharing instagram stories and Maja even goes back to the scene of the crime to use her swimming skills* in an attempt to find any proof of the girl's fate to no avail. Upon finding her dog lost on the street one rainy night though, she returns it to her mother and seconds away from confessing, decides not to do it. Jana sees her doing it, and threatens to kill her if she ever does.
*Apparently the underwater scenes were the most challenging to be filmed and the first of their kind in Macedonian cinema but they were absolutely gorgeous and one of the highlights of the film for me!
Back on the island, Julija is trapped in the basement, watching her parents and Javi through a caged window join a long procession for a religious holiday culminating in a party that night. Out of options to escape, she faces her last resort, the opening in the floor leading to the underwater caves in below the rocks. She jumps in with a flashlight but quickly finds the cave challenging even for her, as there seems to be no exit to the open sea close enough for her to hold her breath. In the midst of panicking she sees an eel (also known in Croatian as murina), and follows its path to the open sea, finally coming out on the other side.
Considering that both of the protagonists are introverted girls, internalizing their feelings rather than making them known, all their emotions come to a boil in the final scenes of the films. Coming out of the sea like truth from her well, Julija shames her father by picking up a rock from the beach and throwing it at him in front of the party and all the people there - the gravest social sin a Balkan girl can do. She taunts him, telling him nobody loves him and inviting him to hit her. He doesn't but the damage is already done. Julija asks Javi to take her with him and give her the life she deserves, but he refuses. She learns she has nobody to depend on but herself.
Similarly, Maja's friendship with Jana has disintegrated. Jana has found a new friend she enjoys doing the same things she did with Maja and the promise of sisterhood and never leaving each other is gone. Jana even goes as far to mock Maja's parents' divorce and turn on her friend and call her Virgin Mary in front of their peers in the swimming pool locker room. It is in this locker room that Maja walks in to learn the body of the girl whom they had recorded was found. Shocked by grief, consumed by guilt, and emboldened by rage, Maja goes back to the swimming pool, wordlessly pushes Jana in it and begins drowning her like her friend promised she would do to her. She coldly keeps it up, even as onlookers gather around to watch, pressing down Jana's head to make her feel the same terror she felt at being a murderer. At the last moment, she releases her - alive, and walks out of the room, the credits rolling.
In the final scene of Murina, Julija, wearing once again her old swimsuit instead of Javi's, is wordlessly getting ready to go eel-hunting with her father. He passively aggressively throws a rhetoric question at her "Nobody loves me huh? And who loves you? Think about that when you think I'm evil". Below the surface though, Julija gets the final word. Reenacting a dream she has at the start of the movie, she points her harpoon at her father's turned back. As he turns around, she fires it, the harpoon missing the side of his head in a clear warning shot. She unzips the weights holding her down, reaches the surface and keeps swimming until the screen gets dark.
As Sisterhood ended, someone behind me exclaimed "Ugh, I knew it was going to have a stupid end like this!" but the director specifically said she had an ending written and deliberately cut it. At the end of the day, the point of these movies is not to find out whether the girls in them get punished or not. They do, every day, even without doing anything wrong and only by virtue of being born in the societies they have been born in. We know what's going to happen to them, because we see it happen to our schoolmates, cousins, neighbors.
In effect, by not giving them a definitive ending, the (female) writers have given them the ultimate freedom as a character - they can be anything and everything they and the audience wants them to be, something the real life women of the Balkans are still struggling to achieve.
