Tanya Zaitseva, Elena Yakovleva from Leningrad, is a nurse by day and a prostitute catering to foreigners by night. When she suddenly receives a marriage proposal from a Swedish client, she faces a decision that could open the Western world she has long dreamed of, a doorway she barely dares to imagine.
Her closest friends in the trade—Sima Gulliver, Irina Rozanova a former volleyball athlete; Kisulya, Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė; and the striking Zina Meleiko, Lyubov Polishchuk—are regarded as the elite of the profession, and they form a tense, intimate circle around Tanya as she navigates loyalty, money, and risk.
After another run-in with the police, she returns home to share the news with her mother, Natalya Drozhzhina, who believes her daughter is simply a nurse. Tanya is candid: she isn’t marrying for love, but for a chance to own an apartment, a car, savings, and a future she can glimpse as if through a window to the world. In a moment of blunt honesty with her mother, she argues that prostitution is a reality across many trades, insisting that “everyone sell themselves.”
To make the Swedish visa a reality, Tanya confronts a brutal obstacle: her father, whom she has not seen in two decades, demands 3,000 rubles to process the paperwork. The price is steep enough to pull her back into prostitution, trapping her in a web of coercion and dependence she hoped to escape.
In Sweden, the dream quickly feels hollow. Tanya makes a connection with a Russian truck driver employed by Sovtransavto, through whom she manages to send gifts back to her mother in Leningrad. Her Swedish companions remind her bluntly of the money she earned in the USSR, and Edvard Larsen, her former client and fiancé, Tomas Laustiola loves her but cannot help commenting on her habits, further complicating her sense of self in a foreign land.
Tanya remains an outsider in this new world, consumed by homesickness and a longing to return to her mother. Meanwhile, a case alleging illegal foreign currency speculation tied to Tanya surfaces, a serious charge in the Soviet Union that could carry grave penalties. Investigators visit Tanya’s mother and reveal the hidden truths behind her daughter’s high earnings, shattering the fragile sense of security that Tanya had clung to.
Shocked and morally broken by these revelations, Tanya’s mother—Natalya Drozhzhina—finds herself driven to a desperate act, choosing to end her life by gas in her apartment. A neighbor, Skein, smells the release of gas, bursts into the scene, and drags the desperate mother out of danger, attempting to revive her, but to no avail. The tragedy reverberates across two continents, narrowing Tanya’s options and sealing a fateful turn.
Back in Sweden, Tanya senses that something terrible has happened and, in a panic, abandons her lover and races toward the airport. A car accident on the way to departure ends her journey abruptly, cutting short the life she had tried to steer toward freedom. The film closes on a somber note, with the Russian folk song “Tramp” echoing as a leitmotif, underscoring the loneliness, longing, and losses that define her voyage.
Throughout this story, the lines between dream and danger blur against a stark backdrop of surveillance, bureaucracy, and longing. The film paints a portrait of a woman pulled between two worlds, where every choice is weighed against the cost of belonging, and where the dream of a better life collides with the price of survival.
