A city musician, Peter, 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, Bambas, 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 Bambas's obsessive grandmother and peevish grandfather, and various other hazards, not the least of which is the musical ineptitude of half the quartet. Like Milos Forman, with whom he collaborated on screenplays before making Intimate Lighting, Ivan Passer is a shrewd, even sly observer of the tragicomic futility of everyday life; with an air of casualness, he captures his “real” characters seemingly unawares, raising the normal to the hilarious and then to the grotesque.