Two brothers try to climb out of the shadows of their Holocaust survivor mother's (Jacqueline Bissset) dark past - and the love affair she conducted with a Nazi doctor while in the camps. Decades after their mother's experience, which left her blurring the lines between pleasure and pain, the sons' lives still reverberate with the damage. One is a sharp, charming, intensely sexual but loveless con artist working in an exploitive modeling agency, while carrying on a carnally extreme relationship with his boss. The other is a brilliant but reclusive pianist unable to venture from the house. But change has come upon the family. The reclusive brother is moving out of his parents' home for the first time; the ambitious brother is about to make a deal with an alluring new business partner who promises to jump-start a new life; and their mother finds herself pursued by a treacherous figure from long ago. As duplicity, moral compromise and the ghosts of the past haunt their ...(more)

Two brothers try to climb out of the shadows of their Holocaust survivor mother's (Jacqueline Bissset) dark past - and the love affair she conducted with a Nazi doctor while in the camps. Decades after their mother's experience, which left her blurring the lines between pleasure and pain, the sons' lives still reverberate with the damage. One is a sharp, charming, intensely sexual but loveless con artist working in an exploitive modeling agency, while carrying on a carnally extreme relationship with his boss. The other is a brilliant but reclusive pianist unable to venture from the house. But change has come upon the family. The reclusive brother is moving out of his parents' home for the first time; the ambitious brother is about to make a deal with an alluring new business partner who promises to jump-start a new life; and their mother finds herself pursued by a treacherous figure from long ago. As duplicity, moral compromise and the ghosts of the past haunt their vivid sexual and emotional relationships, the family careens towards a shattering catharsis. (less)