A neurotic film critic obsessed with the movie Casablanca (1942) attempts to get over his wife leaving him by dating again with the help of a married couple and his illusory idol, Humphrey Bogart.
After being bitten by a cobra in the Philipines, Lena can turn herself into a snake and she stops aging. The curse comes with a price. The priestess Lena must consume cobra venom and vital young men to stay young.
Before going off to World War II, Frank Arnold (Richard Crenna) relocates his wife, Ann (Claire Bloom), and son, Joshua (Richard Thomas), to New Mexico. Joshua has a difficult time fitting in, finding himself a minority in a predominantly Latino community, and his mother doesn't fare much better, treating her loneliness with increasing quantities of alcohol. At length, Joshua makes some friends and begins to adjust, but bad news from overseas threatens to spoil what he's accomplished.
At Oceanfront High School, female students are being targeted by an unknown serial killer. Meanwhile, a married teacher hides his flings with nubile students, and an awkward male is frustrated by the plethora of uninhibited freewheeling young girls.
Over a booze-fueled, increasingly hectic five-day shoot in East Hampton, Norman Mailer and his cast and crew spontaneously unloaded onto film the lurid and loony chronicle of U.S. presidential candidate and filmmaker Norman T. Kingsley debating and attacking his hangers-on and enemies. This gonzo narrative, “an inkblot test of Mailer’s own subconscious” (Time), becomes something like a documentary on its own making when costar Rip Torn breaks the fourth wall in one of cinema’s most alarming on-screen outbursts.
Separation concerns the inner life of a woman during a period of breakdown – marital, and possibly mental. Her past and (possible?) future are revealed through a fragmented but brilliantly achieved and often humorous narrative, in which dreams and desires are as real as the ‘swinging’ London (complete with Procul Harum music and Mark Boyle light show) of the film’s setting.