Review: Golden Years — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Golden Years

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

Stars: Esther Gemsch, Stefan Kurt, Ueli Jäggi 

Writer: Petra Biondina Volpe

Director: Barbara Kulcsar

Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival

 

Peter is adrift. He’s just retired from a big company named Juventa (Latin for “Youth”), where he’s overstayed his welcome so long he won’t even be replaced.

“Who’ll be in my old office?” he asks a 20-something HR woman.

“Nobody,” she says. “I think they’re putting servers in there.”

Things are not much better for Peter’s wife, Alice. The magic has disappeared from her marriage, and her daughter is already figuring what walls to knock down after Mom and Dad leave their house and move into an old folks’ condo.

Then there’s their best friend, Heinz. He’s just lost his beloved wife and doesn’t know how he’s going to go on without her.

Alice thinks she’s found the perfect way to reignite her marriage: a romantic Mediterranean cruise.

Peter thinks he’s found the perfect way to cheer up his old friend: Invite him along.

Peter and Alice are Swiss, but there’s a wonderful universality to director Barbara Kulcsar’s lighthearted reflection on the gentle crises that, at one point or another, float into the lives of us all as we age out of the world’s youth-obsessed mainstream. Ask Peter (Stefan Kurt) or Alice (Esther Gemsch) if they are getting old, and they would probably stare at you quizzically. Having only recently emerged from the uncertain comforts of middle age, they are more mystified than mournful at the prospect of joining the ranks of (let’s just say it) the elderly.

And so, off they go, the three of them, on a lavish Costa cruise ship. But it’s not smooth sailing for Alice, who is distressed to discover Peter would rather hang with Heinz (Ueli Jäggi) than laze by the pool or dance with her. So upset is Alice that, when the ship docks in Marseille, France, she doesn’t bother to get back on board. As Peter sails off into the sunset — frantically searching the ship for her — Alice buys herself a new dress, checks into a hotel, and, for the moment at least, feels the weight of the world lifted from her shoulders.

But Alice has also hatched a Plan B: Following the death of Heinz’s wife, Magali (Elvira Plüss), she found a cache of letters written by Magali to a secret lover in the South of France. Newly unburdened, she texts Peter promising to meet him back home and heads off into the mountains to bring the sad news of Magali’s passing.

Golden Years does have its shaggy dog passages, but whenever the narrative seems to stall, we still have the pleasing company of the stars. As Alice, Gemsch exudes that infectiously defiant youthfulness that the more sedentary of us may find less inspiring than taunting. Kurt, a longtime European TV star, brings to Peter a resigned weariness that, in the end, can only be vanquished by rediscovering the dynamic he once shared with his wife, yet somehow forgot.

Golden Years is a Swiss film, and as the characters move from Switzerland to France to Italy, they slip from German to French to Italian — and, yes, to English — as easily as they go from lunch to dinner.

If you’re not quadrilingual, like our European friends, the least you can do is try to keep up with some subtitles.