Set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century bourgeois France, the story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.

Follows a single rainy day in the lives of the inhabitants of Arlington Park in the English suburbs, as they live out the dubious accomplishments of their lives in a world rife with contentment and anxiety but empty of belief.