You can tell just by watching his films that Rodrigo García has a profound love and respect for women. In most American movies you tend to forget that the “fairer” sex can be more complicated than adjectival designations like, in the Hollywood parlance, “spunky” or “stoic,” or how “quirky” functions in indie cinema; flat one-note descriptions come to stand in for character development. But García (together with the typical brilliance of his chosen actress), by contrast, renders each woman he focuses on the most endlessly interesting individual to ever walk the earth. He accomplishes this through the details: A wealth of subtext springs from the capturing of something as simple as a woman gleefully kicking off her heels to run barefoot across the hardwood floors of a friend’s lavish apartment. In his newest collection, Nine Lives, as in his other features, including Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, García mines the numerous fascinations a bare-bones examination of shared humanity—by way of an extended focus on women as seen through the prism of their relationships—can yield.

The director again adopts a format perfectly suited to his complexly virtuosic snapshot portraits, which, in other hands, tend to result in clumsy cinematic passages best forgotten, but here—with seeming effortlessness—blossom into their fullest potential. Clean, precise prose and rhythmically modulated slivers-of-life carry the succinct lyrical power of a well-told short story. The more ambitious conceit of this latest vignette compendium revolves around its single shot/single story composition, as García merges the unbroken takes of Ten Tiny Love Stories with the tenuously intertwined character shorts of Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her for a dynamic union. If the latter probes the isolated but collective experience of loneliness in the search for love, and the former the secret smiles and head-slapping humiliations that go along with it, Nine Lives illustrates, in its mostly self-contained chapters—yup, nine of ’em—the sometimes damaging effects of emotional closeness.

The film’s uniquely illuminating properties arise from García’s insistence upon registering the elusive moments hidden in the cracks between extreme highs and lows; he has an empathic affinity for full disclosure of those vulnerable moments most revealing of an insecurity, a sly streak of cruelty, an unacknowledged longing — the ones you keep to yourself and skip over when rehashing an incident to a friend. Like the moment when Diana (Robin Wright Penn) spots her ex in a grocery store, braces herself for a minute, and then circles around to his aisle and feigns happy surprise. Or how Sonia (Holly Hunter) attempts to smooth over a rough patch with her boyfriend in the company of friends only to find herself in an even more awkward position as initial attempts to glide lightly through are thoroughly stymied. (And later, this too, we know, will become an anecdote told to others, a way to own the embarrassment.) We identify with these representations of basic human behavior while García continues to eloquently build on his thematic bottom line: We’re connected to one another though we go through our harrowing experiences alone.

Teasingly, he ends scenarios just as the drama crests, leaving us wanting more—a rare occurrence in an era rife with long-winded bullshit—and we can’t help but wonder what leads each woman to this particular juncture in her life. On the most facile level, for instance, we ponder what the inherently gentle Sandra (Elpidia Carrillo) did to land herself in prison. Or to whose grave Maggie (Glenn Close) visits with her very young daughter (Dakota Fanning). And then, a deeper line of inquiry: What allows Sonia to subject herself to such an asshole? How does Vanessa (Sydney Tamiia Poitier) continue to live with her father and go along with undisturbed blitheness in the face of her older sister’s (Lisa Gay Hamilton) accusations? Yet, much as we crave further knowledge, there’s a singular sense of history present in each character—made palpable in a skillful balance between words and withholdings—so that more information would be overkill. On the way to the funeral of her ex-husband’s wife, Lorna (Amy Brenneman) asks her mother, “How do you sum up a person?” Nine Lives suggests a brief excerpt from a person’s life reveals most of what you need to know.

As with Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, the spare loveliness of the scenes owe much to the uncut integrity of space and time. The fluidity and energy generated as a result of this stylistic choice lends a verisimilitude which emphasizes the universal identification the film encourages. Real time also lends itself well to nuance, the ironing out of clichés incongruous with a subtle approach. García’s rigorous avoidance of the hackneyed even becomes part of an in-joke when Alma (Mary Kay Place) remarks somberly at the funeral, “Life is fleeting.” The uncertain pause which follows the utterance is mirrored by the spectator, who can’t quite believe the careful director has succumbed to a throwaway line. It’s a relief when, after a split-second hesitation, her onscreen husband and daughter erupt in laughter, the sentiment too trite to be taken seriously.

But all this finely wrought work would mean nothing if García didn’t have the right actresses to support such sustained scrutiny. Luckily for us, for the most part, he does. As in Ten Tiny Love Stories, an actress occasionally falls short of a role’s demands, and the seams come undone; the character comes off as rehearsed rather than real. In Nine Lives, such is the case with Amanda Seyfried, the young actress who plays Samantha; she’s not quite seasoned enough, a bit too self-conscious to be persuasive, especially next to the easy naturalism of Sissy Spacek as her mother. But this failure consequently allows us to appreciate and take even more pleasure in the age and experience of the mostly mature actresses, for once valorized over the youthful. These women are breathtaking, lived-in, flawed; in other words, exhilaratingly human, a far cry from the usual fantasies of the feminine.