The poor, lower-class girl Eliza Dolittle sells flowers at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral to passers-by. Her plain jargon, her headstrong way of expressing herself, fascinates the briefly passing-by language researcher and phonetics teacher professor Higgins. He meets a good acquaintance, colonel Pickering, who is also interested in science, and makes a wager with him: Higgins bets that he can accomplish that, within just six months, he can turn the squalid girl with grubby looks into a gentle lady of the London society with splendid manners and a likewise pronunciation. Eliza may not know what’s coming for her, but after some persuasiveness, she agrees to move into the fine house of the professor.
Woman concert singer seeks to connect with her adult daughter, by her former marriage to a staid industrialist who has kept the two apart since the daughter was a small child, and gets inadvertent help from the industrialist's fired employee who has fallen in love with the girl.
The young Gaby is happily married to the musician Peter but cannot ignore the impression that his friend Michael, a violin virtuoso, makes on her. Even when Peter falls seriously ill, she cannot forget her love for Michael. Torn between the two men, Gaby sees only one way out...
The movie follows two distinct plot lines until the two eventually merge: the first is that of the bored middle-aged man seeking a departure from monotony in his life; the second is that of the blind man and the little boy, his grandson, who are interdependent. None of the characters have been given names and are therefore referred to only by description. The city is an expressionistic nightmare, a dangerous and chaotic place.
Lorenz Lubota is a city clerk with no direction in life. One day on his way to work he is run over by a woman driving a chariot and he is immediately infatuated with her.