A city musician arrives in a small provincial town for a concert at which he is to be soloist. There he visits his old friend from the conservatory, now the director of the town's music school. Much of the film's scant plot revolves around the efforts of a string quartet to rehearse its way through Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" amid disastrous dinners, interruptions by bored girlfriends, insinuations by obsessive grandmothers, and various other hazards not the least of which is the musical ineptitude of half the quartet. Passer is a shrewd, even sly observer who captures his "real" characters seemingly unawares, raising the normal to the hilarious and then to the grotesque. With cinematographers Ondricek and Strecha he gives form to the pervasive disappointment that results in individual isolation-and perpetual banality. (Even Mozart is out of joint.) But mocking smalltown lives is not Passer's concern; the everyday futility experienced by the provincial intellectual is more than met by that of his urban counterpart. The message hit home and although this masterful film became an emblem of the Czech New Wave for the world, Passer was unable to make another film until he emigrated to the United States in 1971.