Salvador Mallo, a filmmaker in the twilight of his career, remembers his life: his mother, his lovers, the actors he worked with. The sixties in a small village in Valencia, the eighties in Madrid, the present, when he feels an immeasurable emptiness, facing his mortality, the incapability of continuing filming, the impossibility of separating creation from his own life. The need of narrating his past can be his salvation.
Ten-year-old Nico receives a threatening letter and now his life is in danger. No one seems to believe him except one person that he doesn't know.
Villaviciosa de al Lado is a peaceful town stuck in time, living exclusively of the fame of a 200 years-old spa. Therefore, city hall's debts threatens to close the spa and ruin all town. Their salvation becomes when suddenly mayor Anselmo and the rest of members of city hall realize that they won the Christmas Lottery. But their happiness turns in horror after to discover that the prize belongs to a serial number distributed by the town's brothel, causing the suspicion of the wives and fear of the husbands after a TV interview where Mari, brothel's owner, claims that the almost men of the town will have prize from the lottery. Wanting a way to charge the prize to save the town without having to suffer the anger of their respective women, Anselmo, Ricardo, César, Juandi and Paco plots a plan in order to steal the money from the brothel, meanwhile Mari tries reconcile her stranded life and restore the memory of her deceased father, a former mayor.
Joan Mares obsession for the lovely and luscious Norma Valenti takes epic proportions because he cannot let go of her. After he is injured by some skin heads, he uses his scars to pursue his life as a street musician. He devices a plan to get to Norma and she never catches on to his deceit, except she realizes that as Juan Faneca his performance in bed is exactly what she had experienced with Joan Mares because she concludes they were taught sex by the same prostitute.
Recently released from a mental hospital, Ricky ties up Marina, a film star he once had sex with and keeps her hostage.
Honorio Sigüenza is a man in his forties who has always lived under the yoke of his possessive mother. When his mother dies, he undergoes a radical transformation that will lead him to live numerous love affairs in the face of the disapproval of his cousin Veni, who wanted to marry him.
A conflicted youth confesses to crimes he didn't commit while a man and woman aroused by death become obsessed with each other.
A medieval alchemist (Klaus Kinski), knight (Harvey Keitel) and priest (Fernando Rey) mistake a flying-saucer alien for a dragon.
Rafael, a young man from the provinces, works as a waiter in a resort and helps himself economically having sex for money with rich older women. During a bomb threat, he is discovered in bed with one of the guest, Leonor Marchioness of Montenegro, and he is fired as a consequence. The Marchioness of Montenegro is an aging aristocrat, ruined economically, but still with wealthy and influential friends. She helps Rafael finds a new job in Madrid as the gardener in the mansion of Antonio Fernández Herrador, Minister of economy in the new democratic Spanish government.
During the last years of Franco's dictatorship, Fernando, an old republican exile, returns to his home in a small Castilian village and befriends Aurora, a young and attractive teacher.
When Michel gets the life-sized sex doll he ordered, shipped directly from Japan, he is only intrigued by it at first. Then the silent unresponsiveness of the thing begins to haunt him, and he finds himself reacting to it as if it were an equally unresponsive living woman. As time passes, more and more of his life is spent trying to satisfy or placate its relentless silence, and he goes somewhat mad. He dresses the doll and takes it with him wherever he goes. When his usually very tolerant wife discovers what is going on, her jealousy knows no bounds and she attempts to imitate this threatening love-object. The light-hearted quality of this addle-pated fantasy darkens quickly when various neighborhood men attempt to put the doll to its originally intended use.
When the single middle-aged Luis travels from Barcelona to bury the remains of his mother in the vault of his family in Segovia, he is lodged by his aunt Pilar in her old house where he spent his summer of 1936 with her. He meets his cousin Angelica, who was his first love, living on the first floor with her husband and daughter, and he recalls his childhood in times of the Spanish Civil War entwined with the present.