Stretching across the canvas of the Sino-Japanese War of the 30s, the subsequent Japanese surrender in 1945, and the onslaught of Communism, this film depicts an ill-fated romance between a talented lady novelist and a Chinese traitor working with the Japanese who fall victim to the mayhem of war and their tragic inability to reconcile political differences.
In 1973 Vietnam, gas bombs are dropped on villages, killing men, women, and children. Two downed American pilots, accused of the bombings, are captured and tortured.
As he gradually turns mad, the dancer Nijinsky evokes the important episodes of his life. In costumes and sets of lush beauty, the divine puppet performs in a final show where the secondary characters are named: Diaghilev, Isadora Duncan, Stravinsky, Auguste Rodin, Léon Bakst.
On a West German Autobahn, Robert plummets from a bridge and is hospitalized. As he recovers, he flashes back to a Bulgarian holiday where he met Jutta and her uncle Lothar, who’d ordered a West German passport to smuggle her out of the DDR.
Lucia (Natassja Kinski) is a volatile, exciteable young woman. She forms a romance with Carlo (Stefano Dionisi), who is somewhat callow and is very skittish.
Clarence Flamer hosts a late-night talk show on regional radio station North Star Sound. A phone call he takes one night leads to his discovering a mortgage scam being run by a group of estate agents.
The boisterous good humor of Jurmala, the nickel-mine owner, is, if anything, only barely dented by the raging battles in Finland before, during and after World War Two.
With his nephews and niece, everyone's favorite rich uncle, Scrooge McDuck, treks from his mansion home in Duckburg in search of the long-lost loot of the thief Collie Baba.