On her wedding day, all that stands between a young woman and marital bliss with her soon-to-be husband is surviving the chaos and expectations of family and friends, each intensifying her spiraling panic.
Australian journalist Guy Hamilton travels to Indonesia to cover civil strife in 1965. There—on the eve of an attempted coup—he befriends a Chinese Australian photographer with a deep connection to and vast knowledge of the Indonesian people, and also falls in love with a British national.
In three separate segments, set respectively in 1966, 1911, and 2005, three love stories unfold between three sets of characters, under three different periods of Taiwanese history and governance.
A female attorney learns that her husband is really a marine officer awol for fifteen years and accused of murdering fifteen civilians in El Salvador. Believing her husband when he tells her that he's being framed as part of a U.S. Military cover-up, the attorney defends him in a military court.
A renowned ophthalmologist is desperate to cut off an adulterous relationship…which ends up in murder; and a frustrated documentary filmmaker woos an attractive television producer while making a film about her insufferably self-centered boss.
After fierce Roman commander Marcus Vinicius becomes infatuated with beautiful Christian hostage Lygia, he begins to question the tyrannical leadership of the despotic emperor Nero.
Beautiful, funny, passionate, and calculating, Becky is the orphaned daughter of a starving English artist and a French chorus girl. She yearns for a more glamorous life than her birthright promises and resolves to conquer English society by any means possible. A mere ascension into the heights of society is simply not enough. So Becky finds a patron in the powerful Marquess of Steyne whose whims enable Becky to realise her dreams. But is the ultimate cost too high for her?
It all began on a couch. He watched her undress and they made love for the first time.
Alex is very close to his elderly grandmother partly because his busy parents seem to have little or no time for him. One day he surprises two boys from his school leaving her house and is shocked to find her tied up inside – they have robbed her! Alex is sworn to secrecy as his gran is worried that her daughter will think her incompetent. This secret leads Alex into trouble as the two boys accost him in the street and bully him into becoming a pickpocket ("tasjesdief") for them, mugging old ladies. Alex learns how to deal with this situation in the end.
David, a naive graduate student, has volunteered to work as a 'buddy' for people dying of AIDS. Assigned to the intensely political Robert, a lifelong activist whose friends and family have abandoned him following his diagnosis, the two men, each with notably different world views, soon discover common bonds, as David's inner activist awakens and Robert's need for emotional release is fulfilled.