The movie certainly deals with modern relationships and the fact that there is a diminishing role for affection and trust. One of the strengths of the movie is the reality that one feels while watching it. We feel that somehow we are transplanted in the tangled lives of these four characters. The characters and events are mostly weaved in conversation style from scene to scene. Thus, the communication in the movie is the key element to understand what drives someone in a perfectly good relationship to cheat and risk losing the one they love and love them back.
Another year passes by; Dan and Alice are invited to Anna's exhibit. While getting ready to go out, Alice starts a serious conversation with Dan. She tells him she is waiting for him to leave her. She looks directly at him while he is shaving and asks "I love you, why won't you let me love you? . . . Why won't you let me love you? " He gets quiet for a moment and then he insensitively tells her "Let's go to this thing, I will get on my train, I will be away one night. I will be back before you know it" Even though he is trying to divert her from the topic as a way of a supporting response, he is actually denying her feelings. By this point, Alice knows of Dan's feelings toward Anna. She knows he kissed Anna and she knows that he is not completely with her.
In the opening scene, twenty-four-year-old Alice Ayres (Natalie Portman) and Dan Woolf (Jude Law) see each other for the first time from opposite sides of a street as they are walking toward each other among many other rush hour pedestrians. Alice is a young American stripper who just arrived in London and Dan is an unsuccessful British author who is on his way to work where he writes obituaries for a newspaper. Alice looks in the wrong direction as she crosses the street and is hit by a taxi cab right in front of Dan's eyes. He rushes over. She smiles to him and says, "Hello, stranger." He takes her to hospital where Alice is treated and released. Afterward, on the way to his office, they stop by postman's park, the same park that he and his father visited after his mother's death. Pausing in front of the office before he leaves her and goes to work, he reminds her that traffic in England tends to come on from the right, and on impulse, he asks her for her name. They soon become lovers.
The main theme of the film follows Mozart's opera Così fan tutte, with references to that opera in both the plot and the soundtrack. The soundtrack also contains songs from Jem, Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan, Bebel Gilberto, The Devlins, The Prodigy and The Smiths.
The music of folk singer Damien Rice is featured in the film, most notably the song "the blower's Daughter," whose lyrics drew many parallels with the themes present in the film. The opening notes from Rice's song "Cold Water" are also used repeatedly, notably in the memorial park scenes.
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