I've seen this film more than once but I'm confused about the ending.
I know she died or at least I think she did but how do you explain the parts where she's happy to see Volodja again (she even asks him if he's real and if she can touch him) and when she tells Andrej that she's not coming with him.
Did she get a second chance or is it like "this is how it should've happened"?
Being a foreign film I believe the writers were going for a literal meaning. So if we go by that, what happens is that in her last moments alive she pictures what she wishes she would have done if she knew that she was being sold off to forced prostitution.
She would have told Andreji to go to hell and lived in her flat with no electricity with her friend Volodja. Her going back to help the old lady with her potatoes symbolizes the fact that she would have chosen to be more mature if she had a chance to do it all over. I'm also assuming that she would have just kept prostituting from time to time until she could find a more permanent solution.
A few moments after that, she dies and goes to what she considered her version of heaven. Its a place where her and Volodja can be together, safe, happy, free and have no worries.
She jumps. Gets fatally hurt. Dies in the emergency ambulance.
Everything else is poetic addition. The guy who wrote the movie worked as a poet before making this movie, and sometimes it shows, especially in the end.
Thus she's an angel, meets her old friend again. And she revisits a previous part of her life and does sa no to her pimp.
Its all afterlife and dreams, though. Her actual life is over.
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You shall have no other Kates before Kate Winslet.