Antoine, a successful French civil engineer, travels to Tangiers to supervise the construction of buildings for a large media center. His real motivation, however, is to seek out his first love from thirty years before, Cécile. Having discovered that Cécile lives in Tangiers, he begins anonymously sending her roses every day at the radio station where she hosts a French-Arabic program, but she is uninterested in her secret admirer. Cécile, who married a man shortly after ending her relationship with Antoine, only to divorce later, is currently married to a younger man, Nathan, a Moroccan Jewish physician.
The Hotel New Hampshire is narrated by John Berry and opens in flashback to the time when his parents met and fell in love while working summer jobs at a New England hotel around World War II. They are brought together by Freud, a European refugee who travels with a performing bear.
Michael Pappas (Peter Gallagher) and Cathy Featherstone (Daryl Hannah), a young couple who have just graduated from college in the United States, have known each other about 10 years and have been together about half that time. They vacation for the summer on a Greek island. When they visit a nude beach crowded with other young tourists, they are hesitant at first but find themselves getting caught up in the uninhibited energy that surrounds them.
The movie begins in a theatre, where Dominik Santorski and his parents listen to Schubert's lied "Der Doppelgänger", which provides a key to the interpretation of the whole film. His parents have success-driven careers and are out of touch with their son's life. Dominik is popular at his private school, but is also spoiled by the perks given to him by his wealthy parents. While at school, his friends stumble upon a self-harm video while using his computer. Later, he watches the rest of the self-harm video and leaves a comment for the poster.
Sam (Christian Bale) and Alex (Kate Beckinsale) are a newly engaged couple who move to Los Angeles to further their careers. Sam is a recently graduated psychiatrist, starting his residency, while Alex, who comes from a very wealthy background, is finishing her M.D.-Ph.D. dissertation on genomics. The relatively strait-laced, upwardly mobile couple plan to stay at the vacant home of Sam's mother, Jane (Frances McDormand), a free-spirited record producer in the Laurel Canyon section of the City of Los Angeles.
Set in a dystopian, grey version of 1984, gay British journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) is writing an article about the withdrawal from public life of 1970's bisexual glam rock star Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), and is interviewing those who had a part in the entertainer's career. As each person recalls their thoughts, it becomes the introduction of the vignette for that particular segment in Slade's personal and professional life.
Annabelle Tillman, the daughter of a senator, is sent to a Catholic boarding school after being expelled from two of her previous schools. Simone Bradley, a poetry teacher at the school, is in charge of her dormitory. Annabelle shares the dormitory with an amiable classmate, Kristen. She also shares a room with Katherine, who tends to bully people, and Colins, a student with a nervous disposition.
Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a New York City executive, flirts with a woman wearing an engagement ring on his morning commute. She reciprocates, but when they exit, she disappears into the crowd. He masturbates in the bathroom at work. Brandon and his married boss David (James Badge Dale) hit on women at a club; later, Brandon has sex in a tunnel with the woman David was pursuing.
Zac was born on Christmas in 1960. He had a special relationship with his father Gervais, but things began to fall apart as Zac's non-masculine ways started to show. Their unique relationship officially came to an end when Gervais comes home to find Zac dressed in his mother's clothes. Ever since then, he "had unwittingly declared war on his father".
Hansel Schmidt is an East German "slip of a girly boy" who loves rock music, and is stuck in East Berlin until he meets Luther Robinson, an American soldier. Luther falls in love with Hansel and the two decide to marry. This plan will allow Hansel to leave communist East Germany for the capitalist West. However, in order to be married, the couple must consist of a man and a woman. Hansel's mother, Hedwig, gives her child her name and passport and finds a doctor to perform a sex change. The operation is botched, however, leaving Hansel – now Hedwig – with a dysfunctional one-inch mound of flesh between her legs, the eponymous "Angry Inch".
In a prologue, young Gilda Bessé (Charlize Theron), the daughter of a French aristocrat and an emotionally unstable American mother, reluctantly is told the life line on her palm doesn't extend past the age of 34 by a fortune teller. Fast forward to a rainy night in 1933, when she stumbles into the room of Guy Malyon, an Irishman who is a first-year student on scholarship at Cambridge University. She has had a lover's quarrel with one of the dons, and rather than turn her out into the storm, Guy gallantly allows her to spend the night. Later, they become lovers, but the two are separated when Gilda's mother dies and she opts to leave England. Several years later, Guy sees her as an extra in a Hollywood film, and shortly after he coincidentally receives a letter from her inviting him to visit her in Paris, where she's working as a photographer.
In 1957, immediately after co-hosting a 39-hour-long polio telethon in a Miami television studio, entertainers Lanny Morris and Vince Collins fly north to open the new showroom of a New Jersey hotel run by mobster Sally San Marco, who has intimidated them into appearing in order to improve his own image. In their New Jersey hotel suite, shortly after their arrival, the nude body of Miami college student Maureen O'Flaherty is found in a bathtub.
It is the summer of 1984 in Paris. Sarah, a well-to-do writer of children’s books, and her working-class husband, Mehdi, an inspector of North African descent, are confronting some marital problems after the recent arrival of their first child. Sarah, stumbling over a bout of writer's block, has little maternal instinct towards their newborn baby, whose cries she tunes out with earplugs while she works. Her husband despairs when she neglects the child, does what he can to fill in, and sometimes parks the child with his parents. The couple have an open marriage and both are allowed to take outside lovers in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” arrangement that seems to work, although not without tensions.
Film producer James Ballard (James Spader) and his wife, Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), are in an open marriage. The couple engage in various infidelities, but between them have only unenthusiastic sex. Their arousal is heightened by discussing the intimate details of their extramarital sex.