Cassandra, an expatriate American book translator (
Judy Davis) living in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, who is hired by a mysterious woman, Frankie (
Marcia Gay Harden), to locate her missing husband so he can sign some important papers. Nothing Frankie says is true: the husband turns out to be a woman, the issue isn't legal papers but a child's custody, and even Frankie's most obvious identity, in red cape and red pumps, is a false front. But Cassandra keeps at it, at first to earn her promised fee, and then to help Frankie, then Frankie's ex, then the child. Along the way, this solitary and somewhat disconnected and bewildered writer frees herself to finish a novel and re-establish a broken relationship with her own past.
—<jhailey@hotmail.com>