A road trip through Louisiana transforms three strangers who were originally brought together by their respective feelings of loneliness.

A museum worker pretends to be an artist in order to impress women. When an attractive assistant director of a SoHo art gallery overhears him, she offers to exhibit his work. He plays along, which leads to a series of complications following his newfound double life. He starts falling in love with the assistant director, but her art critic fiancé grows suspicious.

A ten year old girl named Angela leads her six year old sister, Ellie, through various regimens of 'purification' in an attempt to rid themselves of their evil, which she believes to be the cause of their mother's mental illness. Precocious, to say the least, Angela has visions of Lucifer coming to take her and her sister away, and one of her remedies for this is for them to remain within a circle of their dolls and toys until they see a vision of the virgin Mary come to them. But such thinking can only lead to an ending befitting of her own mental state.

World Chess Champion Akiva Liebskind (Michel Piccoli) faces his former pupil Pavius Fromm (Alexandre Arbatt), who defected to the West from the Soviet Union five years earlier, for the World Chess Championship in Geneva, Switzerland. The tension and strategies between the players draw parallels to the political conflicts and ideologies between East and West during the Cold War.