In this moving and powerful ensemble piece, a police detective investigates the mysterious death of a young Mexican actress in a bathtub. She has been making a film about a girl who dies in a bathtub, directed by a beautiful and charismatic but troubled Russian woman who seems to have cast a spell on the others involved: a cynical, womanizing British screenwriter who wants desperately to sleep with her, a frustrated Irish actress, and a sardonic Italian assistant director. Was it an accident, suicide, or murder? As the detective gets pulled deeper and deeper into the complex and passionate...

During the German bombardment of Leningrad, earlier and now St. Petersburg, the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, struck on the head by a falling brick, stumbles into a basement for shelter and finds herself unexpectedly back at the long abandoned site of the Stray Dog CafE, where in the second decade of the twentieth century the most famous Russian poets, artists, actors, and dancers gathered to drink, sing, argue, and make love, and gradually the Stray Dog comes to life again, when Mayakovsky, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Mandelstam, the ballerina Karsavina, the puppet loving and famously...