In the first part, Vicky Vitalis, an elderly film director, is casting a new project called "Fatal Bolero," assisted by his nephew, Jérôme.

Later, Jérôme accompanies Vicky's daughter, Camille, a professor of philosophy, as she searches for a copy of The Game of Love and Chance, the play by Pierre de Marivaux.

Increasingly unable to share in his young charges' idealism, Vicky abandons them, filling the role of a West European who turns his back on the horrors of the Bosnian war.

There, Camille and Jérôme metaphorically dig their own graves when they correct a Serbian commander on his account of Georges Danton's participation in the French Revolution.

In the fourth and final movement, a group of people files into an ornate hall to attend a Mozart piano concerto performed by a youth orchestra.

The performance is unable to begin until the pianist, an effete young man in period garb, secures one of the set runners from "Fatal Bolero" as a page turner.

The point of departure for the film was an article by Philippe Sollers in Le Monde about Susan Sontag's idea to stage a performance of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo.

In the article, Sollers criticizes the plan, considering Beckett too depressing for the Bosnian War, and instead suggests Marivaux's The Game of Love and Chance.

In the US, Amy Taubin, writing in the Village Voice, emphatically endorsed the film, saying, "In confronting the failure of art to change the course of history and the moral obligation of the artist to nevertheless bear witness to her/his time, For Ever Mozart treads on ground so familiar it can only be played as farce .