Born in 1972 in Kansas, 8-year-olds Neil McCormick and Brian Lackey are sexually abused by their baseball coach. Both boys are targets for abuse due to their dysfunctional families: Neil's single mother, Ellen, is neglectful and preoccupied with a string of boyfriends, while Brian's parents are on the verge of divorce.
Anna Ivanovna, a British-Russian midwife at a London hospital, finds a Russian-language diary on the body of Tatiana, a 14-year-old girl who dies in childbirth. She also finds a card for the Trans-Siberian Restaurant, which is owned by Semyon, an old vor in the Russian Mafia. Anna thus sets out to track down the girl's family so that she can find a home for the baby girl, having meetings with Semyon, whom she initially regards as friendly. Anna's mother Helen does not discourage her, but Anna's Ukrainian uncle and self-described former KGB officer, Stepan, whom Anna asks for help with the translation of the diary, urges caution. Through translation of the diary, Anna comes to learn that Semyon and his ignorant therefore unstable son Kirill had abused the girl, addicted her to heroin, forced her into prostitution, and raped her. Ultimately, Anna realizes that the baby was fathered by Semyon (in several scenes it is made clear that Kirill is impotent and never had sex with Tatiana).
Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), a young and beautiful housewife, is unable to share physical intimacy with her husband, Dr. Pierre Serizy (Jean Sorel), despite their love for each other. Her sexual life is restricted to elaborate fantasies involving domination, sadomasochism, and bondage. Although frustrated by his wife's frigidity toward him, he respects her wishes.
A somewhat artificial looking young dandy goes to an ornate dance hall, where he finds a young woman to be his dance partner. When he faints from the exertion, a doctor is called. He discovers that the dandy is in fact an old man wearing a mask to hide his aged appearance. The doctor takes the old man home to his patient wife. She explains that her husband Ambroise used to attract the ladies who frequented the hairdresser salon where he worked, but in the space of two years, he lost his looks. He goes out in disguise in an attempt to recapture his youth.
Marie (Simone Signoret), a woman of considerable beauty, is distressed at her treatment by Roland, a criminal who is a part of a local syndicate. When Marie is introduced to the handsome stranger Georges, a humble carpenter, she falls in love with him instantly, much to the chagrin of Roland. When Roland's jealousy builds after a number of meetings between Marie and Georges, Roland decides to confront Georges behind a club where a number members of his syndicate watch. After Georges gains control of a knife that had been thrown between them to initiate the fight, George manages to stab Roland in the back after a brief scuffle, killing him almost instantly. When the police arrive at the scene everyone flees, including Marie, who seeks refuge away from the syndicate at a nearby village.
The film opens in the Paris home of courtesan Violetta Valery, where sheets cover the furniture in dimly lit rooms. Creditors, appraisers, and movers are removing much of the artwork and ornate furnishings. One of them curiously wanders through the rooms, until he comes upon Violetta, bedridden and looking pallid and weak, and he stares at her with undisguised awe. She is startled to see him and follows him to see what he is doing. As she gazes down the long hallway, her delirious mind drifts back to a happier time, and via flashback we are transported to a lavish party she is hosting to celebrate her recovery from an illness. One of her guests, Count Gastone, has brought with him his friend, the young nobleman Alfredo Germont, who has long adored Violetta from afar. She becomes dizzy and retires to her bedroom to recover; he follows her and declares his love. At first Violetta rejects him, telling him love means nothing to her, but she is touched by his concern and offers him a camellia, telling him to return it when it has wilted. He promises to see her the next day.
In 1958 the Merlin law made brothels illegal in Italy. Adua, Lolita, Marilina and Millie are four prostitutes whose brothel in Rome is shut down. Under Adua's leadership, they pool their savings, 500,000 lire apiece, to open a restaurant on the outskirts of Rome. They buy a run-down building, and hire workmen to fix it up, but when they apply to open the restaurant, their permit is rejected because of their history of prostitution. One of Adua's former customers, Ercoli, agrees to buy the building, use his connections, and get the permit in his name, but he expects them to run the restaurant as a front and work as a brothel on the upper floors, in return for a rent of 1 million lire a month.
Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), are a young couple living in New York. They go to a Christmas party thrown by a wealthy patient, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack). Bill meets an old friend from medical school, Nick Nightingale (Todd Field), who now plays piano professionally. While a Hungarian man named Sandor Szavost (Sky du Mont) tries to pick up Alice, two young models try to take Bill off for a tryst. He is interrupted by a call from his host upstairs, who had been having sex with Mandy (Julienne Davis), a young woman who has overdosed on a speedball. Mandy recovers with Bill's aid.
On February 6, 1846, at Paradise Square in Lower Manhattan's Five Points, a territorial battle of hand-to-hand combat between Bill "the Butcher" Cutting's U.S.-born nativist gang, the Natives, and "Priest" Vallon's Irish Catholic immigrant gang, the Dead Rabbits, concludes when Cutting kills Vallon, witnessed by Vallon's young son, Amsterdam. Cutting declares the Dead Rabbits outlawed but orders that Vallon's body be buried with honor. Amsterdam seizes the knife used to kill his father, races off, and buries it along with a medal his father gave him. He is later raised at Hellgate orphanage.
Ben Sanderson (Cage) is a Hollywood screenwriter whose alcoholism costs him his job, family, and friends. With nothing left to live for, he moves to Las Vegas to drink himself to death. As he drives drunkenly down the Las Vegas Strip, he nearly hits a woman, Sera (Shue), on the crosswalk. Sera chastises him and walks away. Sera is a prostitute working for an abusive pimp, Yuri Butso (Julian Sands), a Latvian immigrant. Polish mobsters are after Yuri, so he breaks his relationship with Sera in fear that the Poles may hurt her. Yuri is murdered (off-screen) shortly afterwards.
Erika Kohut is a piano professor at a Vienna music conservatory. Although already in her forties, she still lives in an apartment with her domineering mother; her father is a long-standing resident in a psychiatric asylum.
The film takes place in the 1940s, when Shanghai was under Japanese occupation. A young Chinese woman named Mrs Mai is sitting in a luxurious cafe. She makes a phone call, signaling a group of resistance agents to load their weapons.
In Prague, Czech Republic, single mother Helena (Isabelle Blais) is seduced by a successful handsome man and travels with him to spend a weekend in Vienna, Austria. He then sells her to Human Traffickers and she is brought to New York to work as a sex slave. In Kiev, Ukraine, sixteen-year-old Nadia (Laurence Leboeuf) has recently finished school and, without her father's prior consent or knowledge, she enters a modelling competition. She is selected by the bogus model agency to travel to New York with the other selected candidates, here she is forced into a life of sexual slavery. In Manila, Philippines, twelve-year-old American tourist Annie Gray (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse) is abducted in front of her parents in a busy street by sex traffickers. She is forced into a child brothel which primarily services sex tourists. In common, the girls become victims of a powerful international network of sex traffickers lead by the powerful Sergei Karpovich (Robert Carlyle).
Jeanne Dielman examines a single mother's regimented schedule of cooking, cleaning and mothering over three days. The mother, Jeanne Dielman (whose name is only derived from the title and from a letter she reads to her son), prostitutes herself to a male client daily for her and her son's subsistence. Like her other activities, Jeanne's prostitution is part of the routine she performs every day by rote and is uneventful. But on the second day, Jeanne's routine begins to unravel subtly, as she drops a newly washed spoon and overcooks the potatoes that she's preparing for dinner. These alterations to Jeanne's existence prepare for the climax on the third day.