Back in 1991, two films inaugurated cinema's search for a narrative condition that corresponded with the newest stage of capitalism: globalization. One film was Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth, which expressed the global as the unification of urban space—one night, five taxi rides, five different cities (Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki). And Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World fused narrative forms (cyberpunk sci-fi, corporate espionage thriller, the road movie) into one story that threaded through the streets, hotel rooms, labs, and transportation hubs of several cities. Both films were interesting but ultimately failed to capture the spirit or inner truth of globalization. In the zero-zero decade, Alejandro González Iñárritu got closer to the truth of the global with Babel. This decade's first major attempt to capture the elusive spirit of globalization is Fernando Meirelles's 360.
Meirelles is the Brazilian who is famous for directing City of God. He also directed The Constant Gardener, a film that has a global theme—the relationship between the rich north (the UK) and the poor south (Kenya). 360 begins in Vienna with a thirtysomething Slovakian woman (Lucia Siposová) being photographed by a pimp (Johannes Krisch). Her first assignment is with a British businessman, Michael (Jude Law). The businessman is married to Rose (Rachel Weisz), who works for a fancy magazine and is having an affair with a 25-year-old Brazilian photographer, Rui (Juliano Cazarré). Rui's girlfriend, Laura (Maria Flor), who is also Brazilian, leaves him and London after discovering the affair. During her flight home, Laura meets an old gentleman (Anthony Hopkins) who is traveling to Phoenix to see if the body of a murdered British woman is his daughter. Added to the mad mix of stories is one about a Paris-based Arab dentist in love with his married Russian assistant, and an American sex offender who, with the help of a black American counselor, is attempting to reenter society.
Like all of Meirelles's films, 360 has dazzling cinematography and an excellent rhythm. The music, however, is a little too sentimental, and the moments in the stories are far more interesting and compelling than the stories themselves. There's the moment when the British couple is driving to their daughter's play, the moment when the Slovakian prostitute is sitting in a cafe with an older prostitute, the moment on the busy Parisian street. Maybe it's like this: The global cannot be a story/a cinema. The global can only be a moment/a picture. 
