The United States is less a physical setting than a destination Sofia Papastergiadis imagines for study, independence, and escape. Her plan to finish her doctorate there gathers intellectual ambition and family strain into one uncertain prospect: she submits an application, but the narrative does not establish that she is accepted or moves there.

An imagined academic destination

Sofia connects the United States with two seemingly different inheritances: the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose work gives the country intellectual associations, and Levi Strauss & Co., the maker of blue jeans. The juxtaposition makes the destination both scholarly and ordinary, a place that might offer a temporary home while she completes her doctorate. In conversation with Juan, she considers a memory-focused thesis. His question about where such a study would begin and end meets her own sense that she is often lost among different dimensions of time, with the past sometimes nearer than the present and the future seeming already to have happened.

A plan formed under pressure

The proposed move is bound to Sofia’s family circumstances. When she tells her father she is thinking of finishing her doctorate in the United States, she immediately raises the practical obstacles: she will need to fund her studies and leave Rose Papastergiadis alone in Britain. Her father’s face tightens, and no offer of support follows in the scene. Earlier, Sofia had explained that she slept in the Coffee House storeroom during the week and at Rose’s home on weekends, while much of her time and energy went toward caring for her mother. The academic plan therefore depends on confronting both financial insecurity and the question of who will provide that care.

Application and unresolved outcome

Rose’s wish for amputation becomes a catalyst for action. Shocked by the threat and unable to continue speaking to her mother, Sofia stays awake through the night preparing her application to complete the doctorate in the United States. She works on her shattered digital screen beneath the desert stars, watches the sun rise, and presses Send. The application turns an imagined possibility into a concrete step, but not a confirmed departure.

Later, Rose sits beside Sofia on the hard green sofa of their rented apartment and says she can imagine Sofia finishing her doctorate in the United States. Her response preserves the plan as a shared possibility even as Sofia imagines a future in which Rose walks more independently, wearing smart shoes and setting the pace for a trip to the cinema. The country thus marks a hoped-for route out of Sofia’s stalled academic life, while the ending leaves open how that route might coexist with her changing relationship to her mother.