The Mexican "Midaq Alley, based upon a novel by the Nobel Prize- winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, is a collection of three stories, each happening simultaneously, but told one after another.
Each begins with the same game of dominos being played by four rogues in a bar owned by Rutilio (Ernesto Gomez Cruz).

In part one, this fiftyish gent, married, with two grown daughters and one lazy pot-smoking son, Chava (Juan Manuel Bernal), has given up on passion. When his wife throws him a surprise 30th wedding anniversary dinner and later insists upon a night of passion, Rutilio gives in with a sigh of disgust and subjugation.

But the next day, on the way home after getting a haircut which he hopes will make his gray locks more discrete, he comes across an attractive, obviously gay young blade in a store, and his heart skips a beat. His passion is reborn. Rutilio's in love with a sock salesman.

Soon his infatuation is being returned and very openly, to the dismay of his wife, Chava, and all his friends. What a scandal! Where can it all lead?

The luscious virgin Alma (Salma Hayek) is the focus of part two. Abel (Bruno Bichir), the best friend of Chava and Rutilio's barber, is madly in love with Alma, but she at first only wants him as a sexual experience. As her friend Maru (Tiare Scanda) notes, it is an embarrassment that a girl her age is still suffering from chastity. Anyway, Alma's mother has warned her against wedding a poor man: "Never fall in love with a beggar. They're just as much work."

But Abel is very convincing and Alma's resolve is wearing down, at least until her wooer goes off to America to make enough money so the they can eventually marry and live in style. A few days after he's gone, she has a new proposal from a wealthy, seedy widower. How can she refuse?

The aging, affluent Susanita (Margarita Sanz) with her bad teeth and aching companionlessness, completes the trilogy. While collecting rent from her tenants, she decides to be daring and have her fortune read by Alma's mother. The verdict: her dreams about meeting a young man will come true. Her Prince Charming does eventually arrive but his head appears more in the bank than in the clouds of ardor

Part four occurs two years later, and nothing is resolved the way you would think, which pretty much true to life and in this case, a little death, too.

The result is a startlingly funny, at times desperately despairing, symbiosis of lower-class lives trying to make the best of the few assets they have. Sometimes these folks clobber each other; other times they are each other's savior.

Jorge Fon's direction is taut, Vicente Lenero's adaptation is penetrating and the cast in uniformly ideal with Cruz, Bichir and the never more stunning Hayek being stand-outs.