While 'Julie and Julia' did this with two, 'The Hours' manages to do it with the lives of three women-three very, very, very depressed women who are suffering in silence. 'The Hours' is a very unusual film in that there completely separate but parallel stories that are interwoven throughout. Additionally, if you just can't handle an unrelentingly dark and somber film, then you might want to look further.

There has been no other.WARNING: This is an intensely depressing film and should not be seen by kids or the severely depressed. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. The dinner is by now forgotten Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together. His mouth had opened to hers (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. You end up just sailing from port to port. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.

This is who I am-a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens as being full of infidelities and great battles as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond.

Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. “How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him if she’d returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons.

The hours by michael cunningham