Programmer's Note

Linking stories of chance, temptation and unexpected friendship while travelling through Vienna, Paris, London, Bratislava, Rio de Janeiro, Denver and Phoenix (and back again), 360 takes us around the world, surveying the breadth of human experience at every stop.

A lonely English businessman (Jude Law) is blackmailed by a colleague who discovers his plans to meet a prostitute while travel­ling abroad. A married woman (Rachel Weisz, also appearing in The Deep Blue Sea and the Gala presentation of Page Eight) tries to break things off with her younger paramour. A Brazilian student (Maria Flor) decides to leave her London-based boy­friend and return to Rio. A recovering alcoholic (Anthony Hopkins) flies to Phoenix on the off chance that a new Jane Doe might turn out to be his long-missing daughter. A paroled sex offender (Ben Foster) stuck in a Denver airport has his hard-won com­posure tested when a beautiful stranger unexpectedly propositions him. These are but a handful of the narrative threads woven into 360’s alternately seductive and unnerv­ing roundelay. How they slide against one another constitutes a large part of the film’s mesmerizing allure.

Peter Morgan — the writer behind such smart and provocative hits as The Last King of Scotland, The Queen and Frost/Nixon — takes the essential spirit of his source material and creates something entirely original; his script is imbued with the complexities of modern life, crafting inevitabilities out of what in lesser hands might have played as mere coincidences. Director Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener, Blindness) mean­while makes fluid transitions between places, faces and moods, the whole buoyed by his characteristically artful use of popular music (which in this case includes songs by Tin Hat Trio, featuring Tom Waits, and the late Montreal-based songstress Lhasa).

“If there’s a fork in the road,” one of 360’s characters suggests paradoxically, “take it.” Meirelles and Morgan have heard this advice and run with it, resulting in a film that’s fresh, intelligent and transporting.

Michèle Maheux