In a mountain village in Transcarpathia lives the family of a carpenter Mykhailo Tsar. They are respected everywhere, and the head of the family is very proud of it. Suddenly the son Oleksa fell in love with the paramedic Nadya, although he has a wife and Nadya has a child. Father and brothers force Oleksa to leave his mistress.
In 16th century Japan, peasants Genjuro and Tobei sell their earthenware pots to a group of soldiers in a nearby village, in defiance of a local sage's warning against seeking to profit from warfare.
After breaking up with her fiancé, a gym teacher returns to work at a women's college, but a legal loophole allows him to enroll as one of her students.
In Nebraska, in pioneer days, a woman who knows she is going to die asks a prostitute to replace her with her husband and four children in order to make it possible for them to keep their family farm.
Spanish coquette Tula Moliana finds herself encumbered with two husbands, and to get a divorce from the first, Senator Wakefield, she engages Jim Blake, the fiancé of Helen, the senator's daughter, to be her correspondent.
In 1911, a willful and determined man from peasant stock named Charles Saganne enlists in the military and is assigned to the Sahara Desert under the aristocratic Colonel Dubreuilh.
A womanizing reporter for a sleazy tabloid magazine impersonates his hen-pecked neighbor in order to get an expose on renowned psychologist Helen Gurley Brown.