During World War II, the SS uses prisoners in a brothel: a nearly identical plot , costuming and casting to The Joy Club. Appropriate level of implied coercion. Very good raincoater sex. Le Castel and Letizia Bisset really get into their roles as Nazi sex maniacs.
In the years between WWI and the rise of Fascism, legendary thespian Eleonora Duse shocks everyone by getting back onstage at over 60 years of age. Struggling with the brutality of historical events unfolding and clinging to the possibility of utopia, she makes her art a revolutionary act, even at the cost of sacrificing health and affection—facing her final journey aware she could give up life itself, but not her own true nature.
Rome. The 1980s. After the magnum opus The Art of Joy she has been working on for a decade is rejected by the Italian publishing world, writer Goliarda Sapienza commits a desperate theft that costs her her reputation and social position. Incarcerated in Italy’s largest female prison, she finds herself living alongside thieves, junkies, sex workers and revolutionaries. After her release, she continues to meet with these women and over the course of a sweltering summer, a life-changing relationship flowers – a relationship that will reawaken her the desire to live and to write.
An American spy behind the lines during WWII serves as a Nazi propagandist, a role he cannot escape in his future life as he can never reveal his real role in the war.