A disparate group of characters unknowingly bond by the sexual choices they make. Consumed by loneliness, a British businessman ponders a rendezvous with a prostitute. The businessman's wife prepares to call it quits with her younger lover. A Brazilian student breaks up with her boyfriend in London. A recovering alcoholic travels to Phoenix in search of his missing daughter. A paroled sex offender struggles to stay composed when propositioned in a Denver airport. A widower's religious devotion is put to a difficult test.
Direction
Meirelles crafts visual rhymes across continents.
Acting
Hopkins delivers quiet devastation; Foster simmers with restraint.
Director
Fernando Meirelles
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Meirelles and screenwriter Peter Morgan originally developed this as a loose adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's 'La Ronde,' updating the 1897 play's sexual roundelay for the age of globalism and transactional intimacy.
The film's non-linear structure was so disorienting in early screenings that Weinstein Company briefly considered releasing it with chronological chapter titles — Meirelles refused, calling the confusion 'the point.'
CA
AT
