The Cinematheque

“A melancholy, exquisitely beautiful elegy to the dream of movies as high art.”

Stephen Holden, The New York Times

For Ever Mozart, Godard’s ​“last classical film” by his own description, wrestles with a subject unshakeable for the great auteur: the inadequacy of art to faithfully render, or meaningfully alter, the realities of war, here using the recently waged Bosnian War as its site of rumination. A treatise (or sonata) in four movements, the austere, slippery work concerns an acting troupe who, having travelled to Sarajevo to stage an Alfred de Musset play, is taken prisoner, tortured, and executed in the midst of the intensifying conflict. Mourning the death of his daughter, a film director (Godard surrogate Vicky Messica) creates his opus: a personal, political masterpiece seen by no one. For Ever Mozart was Godard’s hardly veiled response to Susan Sontag’s 1993 staging of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo. Critics were predictably polarized by the film, with fervent defenders and detractors in both camps.

In French and Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles

“The most stimulating and heartening film of the moment. That is to say, a great film, if not a masterpiece.”

Serge Toubiana, Cahiers du cinéma

“I have no doubt … that it’s the most straightforward and profound of the films Godard has made about war.”

Amy Taubin, The Village Voice