When a beautiful fashion model's body is crushed in a traffic accident, and a rather homely woman suffers a brain hemorrhage, doctors decide to transplant the brain of the model into the brain dead woman. Therein comes the dilemma of the former model, Julia, to discover whether it's the body or the mind that make a person who he or she is.
Rejected by her husband, Julia must thwart off the affections of the man once married to the woman, whose body she now inhabits, and convince his children that she is not their mother. Throughout her life, Julie held everyone's attention. Now, she must struggle for it. No longer beautiful, she must come to grips with whom she really is.
The plot foreshadows John Woo's Face Off with Nicholas Cage and John Travolta (though there is no telling if that is where he got the idea), where the faces and identities of two men, one good, one bad, are exchanged.
Ultimately, Julia learns that much of what she believed to be love was based upon how she looked, and not upon who she was inside. The viewer must, of course, give license to the fact that no one has ever successfully transplanted a brain (George Bush grants proof to that) and Julia might have experienced the same dilemma had she been scarred by fire or lost all of her limbs. This was just a less lurid way of putting forth the idea that sometimes love is an illusion; that marriages often fail, not because they grow cold, but because people grow old and the sexual attraction that was the basis of it is now gone.
This is not a great movie, in that it was made for television on a modest budget, but it gives one pause to consider how others might treat us if suddenly we became outwardly different in a not so pleasant way.
