While her husband is in prison, Oh Su-bi engages in extramarital affairs. As she is preparing to leave for France with one of her lovers, her husband is released, and she returns to him.
Romeo and Juliet's families have been in a feud that causes these two lovers to make decisions that change lives forever. The story ends with the two lovers committing suicide.
The film was directed by Stephen Frears and stars Ian McKellen as Walter, a man with a learning disability. The story focuses initially on his youth in which his parents attempt, with little success, to have him adapt into the conditions of a "normal" life. Walter's father dies, followed soon after by his mother. The social services bureaucracy then place him in a psychiatric institution. Walter is molested by another patient, witnesses the murder of a patient by another patient having a breakdown, and remains in the institution for the rest of the film.
The premise of the story is that a father, Phillip (played by Weaver) and mother, Laura (played by Harper) and their two children Kevin and Mary (played by Robins and Ignico, respectively) move out of Los Angeles (as seen in the opening credits) to a house up north in the countryside. Moving in with the family would be their grandmother (played by Gordon), whom nobody in the family other than Laura cared for very much. The family had just suffered the tragedy of losing their oldest daughter Jennifer (played by Cumming) and hope to regroup and start a new life without her.
The Cameron family seems, on the surface, to be the perfect family, but things are not as they seem. Their two teenage children, Scott and Sandy, fall in with the wrong crowds at their high school and eventually become involved with drug experimentation. Sandy, after ingesting angel dust made by her boyfriend in the school's chemistry lab, jumps through a glass window of the school (purposely cutting her arms with the cut glass in the process) and is subsequently paralyzed from the fall. A caring guidance counselor, Eileen Phillips, sees the problem that is going on in the school and, after other tragic incidents involving two other students (one of which involves Scott and his girlfriend smoking drugs and crashing their car off a cliff) and when no one else on the staff is willing to do anything about it, takes the steps to deal with and confront the problem. The aftermath of this tragedy makes Scott and Sandy's parents realize that even their "perfect" kids can be affected by drugs, especially after Scott has a violent reaction and goes into the hospital. At a school assembly, Eileen Phillips storms in and confronts the students about the increasing drug use, sending a message to the crowd about the effects of what the drug problem is doing to the kids and the tragedies that resulted because of it.
Leenie (Redgrave) is a middle-aged Irish-American schoolteacher with three grown daughters. Yet she unexpectedly finds herself pregnant again and is delighted. However her doctor rejects this possibility because of an unreliable blood test and her age. Thus her symptoms such as troubled sleeping and sickness are mis-diagnosed as psychogenic. She is prescribed a host of medications to cope with these difficulties. However it later turns out that she is in fact pregnant and that these medications have been causing irreversible damage to her unborn baby. Faced with the truth that her child will be born with defects, she faces a decision to keep the baby or go against her religious beliefs and have an abortion.
A serial rapist who gets released on a technicality cause of a mishandling of the investigation is pursued by his victims who stalk the man and want revenge for him raping them.
Harry Nash combat sa timidité en faisant du théâtre et se transforme totalement sur scène. Il est engagé pour jouer le rôle de Stanley Kowalski dans une adaptation d'Un tramway nommé Désir. Helene Shaw, de passage en ville, auditionne pour le rôle de Stella Kowalski et l'obtient. Elle tombe amoureuse de la personnalité que Nash est sur scène en ignorant qu'il est totalement différent dans la vraie vie.
Les quatre sœurs Makioka tentent de préserver le prestige de leur nom. Depuis que leurs parents sont décédés, les deux aînées ont pris en charge les deux cadettes, essayant de leur trouver un époux. Mais les deux jeunes filles, chacune à leur manière, se montrent réticentes à se conformer aux obligations que leur imposent les traditions..