Setting forth what is perhaps the apex of Hartley’s uncanny misalliances, Amateur convenes an ex-nun-cum-pornographic-novelist (Huppert), an amnesiac hustler (Donovan), and his prostitute wife (Löwensohn) in a roundelay of trouble and desire as each tries to escape from the illicit sex-and-drugs demimonde of lower Manhattan. Ensconced in a coffee shop booth, the former nun is at work on her next installment for Wet & Wild magazine when the disheveled hustler, who has managed to survive a nasty fall from the upper-story window of an adjacent building, enters and attempts to pay his check with Dutch money. Their meeting initiates his attempt to regain his memory of the past and her quest to begin to experience life first-hand.