Golden Years (Die goldenen Jahre)
Directed by Barbara Kulcsar
Written by Petra Volpe
Starring Esther Gemsch, Stefan Kurt, and Ueli JJ
Runtime: 91 minutes
Unrated
In New York and LA February 23 and available on VOD March 26

by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer

Maybe it’s because I live in Brooklyn (albeit in a neighborhood that’s almost the polar opposite of what might be considered stereotypically hip), but it seems like discussions about non-monogamy are all over the place lately. A long review in The New Yorker, a cat-filled multi-page cover feature in New York Magazine, folks reading More on the R train, you name it. But relationships don’t have to exist solely at the poles of single-pair-bonding and polycules — and Swiss film Golden Years shows the whole spectrum at multiple phases of the characters’ lives.

The film centers on Alice (Esther Gemsch) and Peter (Stefan Kurt), who have just hit retirement age. Peter’s ended a 37-year-long career at a nondescript business, his office being converted to a server room, and Alice is looking forward to spending the titular period with him — and maybe give their staid marriage a needed spark. At Peter’s birthday/retirement party, their children — Susanne (Isabelle Barth), who’s married with three kids, and Julian (Martin Vischer), who’s got a different Tinder date every night — surprise their parents with a Mediterranean cruise. 

But first, tragedy strikes our protagonists’ best friends. On a hike with Alice amid complaints about Peter’s lack of interest in downsizing and on the cruise, Magalie (Elvira Plüss) suffers a fatal heart attack. Magalie entrusts Alice with letters from a French paramour before her passing and leaves a train ticket to Toulouse in her wallet — one passenger, for one-way travel. The death leaves Heinz (Ueli Jäggi), Peter’s drinking and chess buddy, completely unmoored and has Peter thinking deeply about mortality. Peter immediately switches to veganism, becomes a teetotaler, and starts biking like Lance Armstrong after the doping — all of which causes the rift between him and Alice to grow.

But not as much as the idea that sets the film in motion: invite Heinz on the cruise as a third wheel, as a way to cheer him up and give him some time out of the life he and Magalie made with one another. Needless to say, it backfires. Heinz is still shaken by losing Magalie, wearing a vial of her ashes on a necklace. Peter is content with the sexless state of his marriage, preferring time on one of the ship’s treadmills. And Alice is bombarded with images of fellow sexagenarians engaged in PDA, leading her to wonder what went wrong with her marriage. After a girls’ night dancing with fellow Swiss passenger, and recent divorcee, Michi (Gundi Ellert), Alice decides not to check back in on the ship after a stop in Marseille. Peter has a panic attack, and Alice begins a peripatetic journey to Toulouse and Magalie’s lover, Claude Chevalier. 

Along the path of Alice’s Eat Pray Love, there’s a free-spirit retiree couple, touring the Mediterranean coast in an RV and encouraging Alice to try ‘shrooms, and a French socio-feminist commune. Even more varieties of relationships await Alice upon her return home from France. Susanne has a drinking problem and a marriage on the rocks, and Julian’s become nihilistic about the possibility of long-term commitment. And after heading home with Heinz on the first flight from Barcelona back to Zurich and some time adrift at Susanne’s place, Peter decides to have Heinz move in with him, Odd Couple style, in what appears to be a fairly enjoyable homosocial living arrangement. 

There’s at times a too-cozy quality to the film, a kind of sanitized tastefulness. (I half-jokingly said to my spouse that this would be an inside-track pick for Best Foreign Film at next year’s AARP Movies for Grownups Awards.) But I appreciate the bold colors of the costumes (designed by Linda Harper), which mesh well with the interior sets by Mirjam Zimmerman (especially Alice’s Marseille hotel room and the K-Pop mag wallpapered bedroom of Alice and Peter’s eldest granddaughter). Carsten Meyer’s brass-heavy score pairs well with the rest of the soundtrack’s various tunes from across Europe. And it’s a nice introduction to the language that is Swiss German, which is like regular German with some French and a little Italian thrown in for good measure.

But most importantly, I appreciate the film’s core messages. The people closest in your life matter, even if the nature of the relationship changes. Retirement can lead to a jarring of the self, and those in one’s circle, especially if it’s unclear what comes next. And the nature of relationships need not be binary. As Claude (Monica Budde) puts it to Alice upon their meeting, “There are other options than marriage or solitude.” Which makes Golden Years, if not a revolutionary piece of film, then at least a movie with a relatively radical ethos.