-By Chris Barsanti

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The mini-era of the broad tapestry dramas like Babel and Crash, studded with boldface stars and reeking of thematic import, appears to be securely in moviegoers’ rearview windows. This is probably a good thing overall, as that brand of film tended to substitute proximity for a strong narrative—the idea being to just jam enough big events together and hope that viewers will think that they’ve just witnessed something that had meaning.

Fernando Meirelles’s new drama 360 looks on the surface to be another of those—set as it is in multiple cities from Denver to London to Vienna and packing enough thespian firepower for one of those off-year Woody Allen misfires. But except for an unnecessary voiceover at the opening and climax, which tries to tie a loose ribbon around what we’ve just seen, it’s not nearly so self-important or desperate. Because of that, it will also (perversely) probably be much less popular than the films mentioned above, even though there’s life practically bursting out of every pristinely shot scene.

Peter Morgan’s script is yet another gloss on La Ronde, Arthur Schnitzler’s play about sexual gamesmanship in fin de siècle Vienna. In his variation, the structure remains somewhat the same: a series of scenes in which one connection between a man and a woman leads to another, and another. The woman cheating on her husband in this scene will turn out to be the unseen wife being cheated on in an earlier scene, and so on. In Morgan’s take, we start with Jude Law as a guilt-ridden British businessman working in Vienna who tries to set up an assignation with a Slovakian prostitute on her first gig. Then we’re in Paris, where a man is having a cab driver follow a woman in a red beret whom he feels guilty about being in love with. Later scenes jump to London, a prison in Colorado, an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Phoenix, and back to Vienna. The story builds with care from one interaction to the next. While the threads that bind everything together ultimately make for a fascinating web, they aren’t what make the film sing like it does.

Meirelles shows a care here with his actors in their sharply observed scenes that he didn’t have in his last major film, 2008’s stiff exercise in literary modernity, Blindness. While some moments play all too easily to their performer’s strengths (Rachel Weisz’s jittered nerves, Moritz Bleibtreu’s unctuousness, Ben Foster’s snakelike sense of danger), there are many others that stun: Brazillian actress Maria Flor’s edgy take on a woman in free-fall after discovering her boyfriend’s infidelity, Gabriela Marcinkova’s gorgeously emotive scenes where a highly rational woman finds a kindred spirit in a gangster questioning his life. Even Anthony Hopkins brings some of his long-lost gusto here, uncorking a knockout soliloquy about loss and bottoming out that’s among the best things he’s ever done.

360 is not a film that coheres tightly, and almost by definition several of the segues from one interaction to the next are going to feel forced. But the sensations that linger are enough to sustain it, like an extended blues riff. This is a drama in motion, with everybody caught at critical moments where they’re on the cusp of a new life, or disaster, or the same old nothing. The fluidity of it all will, however, make an audience difficult to find; if only they could have found room for Brad Pitt or Matt Damon in the cast somewhere.