When a happily married family man, who would never consider an affair, meets a beautiful woman in red, he is totally infatuated and desperate to make her acquaintance. However, as he tries out various schemes to sneak out to meet her, he realizes that adultery is not quite as easy as it looks.
Foon escapes an arranged marriage by walking the road of a Ji Sor. After an affair with Shing, she becomes pregnant. An attempted abortion nearly costs Foon her life. Wan, the young owner of a silk factory, rescues her. Wan and Foon share their romances, reflecting the experience of women during the 40's.
When asked for her real name, the feisty woman in a rural whorehouse would quip, "Ligaya. It means joy. And that's what I sell." Yet the small-town prostitute is not resigned that she would be in the flesh trade forever. She still harbors the dream of getting out of the job someday. She saves money and fancies that someone would come and marry her as if she were clean and never been a whore. That becomes almost a reality when a hardworking farmer enters her life. Under some problematic circumstances, her chances get blown away-but not exactly of her sole doing.
An emotionally-beaten man with his young daughter moves to his ancestral home in Newfoundland to reclaim his life.
Thomas, the son of a prison warden, falls for Martin, one of the prison inmates. After Martin is released, they try to build a relationship and a life together but, no one will leave them alone.
Barbro and Ulla are two Swedish friends who maintain the myth of Swedish liberty and sexual appetite. Evert and Jan-Olof, their spouses, are not worse, and have competitions about who can give their respective wife the most pleasure.
Ugo Domani has landed as a guest worker in Germany and works in municipal waste collection. As a constantly sharp-edged Papagallo, he is sexually constantly under power and craves for German women.
Guido Anselmi, a film director, finds himself creatively barren at the peak of his career. Urged by his doctors to rest, Anselmi heads for a luxurious resort, but a sorry group gathers—his producer, staff, actors, wife, mistress, and relatives—each one begging him to get on with the show. In retreat from their dependency, he fantasizes about past women and dreams of his childhood.
Lili, a pouty and voluptuous 14-year-old, is caravan camping with her family in Biarritz. She's self-aware and holds her own in a café conversation with a concert pianist she meets, but she has a wild streak and she's testing her powers over men, finding that she doesn't always control her moods or actions, and she's impatient with being a virgin. She sets off with her brother to a disco, latching onto an aging playboy who is himself hot and cold to her. She is ambivalent about losing her virginity that night, willing the next, and determined by the third.
As the romantic monsoon rains loom, the extended Verma family reunites from around the globe for a last-minute arranged marriage in New Delhi. This film traces five intersecting stories, each navigating different aspects of love as they cross boundaries of class, continent and morality.
In nineteenth-century Łódź, Poland, three friends want to make a lot of money by building and investing in a textile factory. An exceptional portrait of rapid industrial expansion is shown through the eyes of one Polish town.
An ex-tennis pro carries out a plot to have his wealthy wife murdered after discovering she is having an affair, and assumes she will soon leave him for the other man anyway.
Precocious teenager Juliet moves to New Zealand with her family and soon befriends the quiet, brooding Pauline through their shared love of fantasy and literature. This friendship gradually develops into an intense and obsessive bond.
Jesse, a small-time criminal, high-tails it to Los Angeles to rendezvous with a French exchange student. Stealing a car and accidentally killing a highway patrolman, he becomes the most wanted fugitive in L.A.
Caye is a young prostitute whose family is unaware of her profession. She meets her striking Dominican neighbour Zulema, an illegal immigrant, after she finds her in the bathroom, badly beaten up. They strike up a close friendship unbeknownst to Caye's xenophobic co-workers.
In the late 1940s, a murderous couple known as the 'The Lonely Hearts Killers' kills close to a dozen people. Two detectives try to nab the duo who find their targets via the personals in the paper.
A veteran high school teacher befriends a younger art teacher, who is having an affair with one of her 15-year-old students. However, her intentions with this new "friend" also go well beyond platonic friendship.
Budapest in the thirties. The restaurant owner Laszlo hires the pianist András to play in his restaurant. Both men fall in love with the beautiful waitress Ilona who inspires András to his only composition. His song of Gloomy Sunday is, at first, loved and then feared, for its melancholic melody triggers off a chain of suicides. The fragile balance of the erotic ménage à trois is sent off kilter when the German Hans goes and falls in love with Ilona as well.
When Isabelle and Theo invite Matthew to stay with them, what begins as a casual friendship ripens into a sensual voyage of discovery and desire in which nothing is off limits and everything is possible.
Various lives converge on an isolated island, all connected by an author whose novel has become inextricably entwined with his own life.