The popular Pygmalion formula, popularized in the Hollywood musical "My Fair Lady," gets a decidedly Hong Kong cinema twist in this bawdy comedy. Sam, a successful gigolo whose skill with the ladies is only exceeded by his impeccable taste, teaches Chinese mainlander Chung Siu-Hung how to be a call girl.
Sixty year old Max is having something of a middle-age crisis. His marriage seems to go nowhere as the passion, tenderness and happiness vanished when their daughter moved out.
Claude, a militant anarchist, is caught stealing and is shot by a policeman while fleeing the scene. Dodo, a hairdresser, is hit by one of the stray bullets.
Carmen, a journalist with two children, is on her third marriage, to Antonio, a record producer. Over the course of a year, we follow her through her discontents: Antonio's lateness, his fatigue when she wants to make love, his insistence on her company when she prefers solitude, his treating her work as less important than his, his casual and cruel dismissal of her opinions, her boss assigning her an incompetent editor, bartenders ignoring her, her passage into middle age.