The sculptor lives as a hermit in the country, drinking vodka with a local cheerful drunkard and "sealing plaster piglets" for his wife, who sells these products on the Old Arbat. A friend sends him a rubber woman from Italy who miraculously assumes the appearance of a living woman. He buys outfits for the "doll", paints portraits of her, and life becomes joyful for him. Happiness, however, was broken by the drunkard who stole a doll with dirty intentions.
Somewhere in Los Angeles, the city of broken dreams, a stripper is murdered. Now, the private detective she had hired and her ex-footballer boyfriend are going to find her murderer.
Pierre is a womanizing photographer, with a slight mean streak. For whatever reason, Camille, an artist in her own right, finds him entrancing and easily succumbs to his devious efforts to get her into bed.
Dough-crazed mercenaries Sammy and Klaus are on a mission to escort the seriously ill prime minister of a South American country that has just been taken over by the rebels to his buddies over the border.
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.
The boy who wasn't supposed to grow up—Peter Pan—does just that, becoming a soulless corporate lawyer whose workaholism could cost him his wife and kids.
In Los Angeles, a gang of bank robbers who call themselves The Ex-Presidents commit their crimes while wearing masks of Reagan, Carter, Nixon and Johnson.
