Short Cuts

Across several days in Los Angeles, the film follows a large cast of loosely connected characters whose lives brush against one another: couples, parents, waitresses, doctors, and drifters caught in moments of infidelity, loss, and misunderstanding. The stories overlap without fully explaining themselves, building a mosaic of a city and its ordinary damage.

Observed at scale, the film becomes an anatomy of human defence: denial, displacement, and the small cruelties people commit under the pressure of grief and disappointment. It is useful for thinking about how psychic life plays out in everyday behaviour rather than in dramatic confession. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1993, and draws on the short stories of Raymond Carver.