Title note: While the official on-screen English title is What a Way to Go, the film is currently being promoted in English-language cinema listings as Five Plums, a direct translation of the Czech title Pět švestek.
A quintet of senior citizens take one last seafaring trip off the coast of Greece in What a Way to Go (Pět švestek), a new Czech comedy-drama opening this weekend in Prague cinemas (and with English subtitles at Kino Atlas, Edison Filmhub, and select other venues). This latest feature from Oscar-winning writer-director Jan Svěrák (Kolya) is heartfelt and at times riotously funny, and represents another solid showcase for the filmmaker’s deft blending of serious subject matter and bitter irony. But while it should be a hit with Czech audiences, the local humor and somber themes may limit its appeal abroad.
What a Way to Go is the latest addition to what has become a familiar subgenre of contemporary Czech cinema: films that tackle the subject of encroaching death with a matter-of-fact touch and light comedy, following in the footsteps of The Tiger Theory and Ice Mother (and, going back a bit further, Autumn Spring). It’s a delicate balance to maintain, but Svěrák’s approach is especially well-suited to the material following collaborations with his father Zdeněk Svěrák that explored similar territory, such as Empties.
The elder Svěrák, who recently celebrated his 80th birthday in Prague, does not appear in any capacity in What a Way to Go, the first time he has not been featured in a significant role in one of his son’s films since 2001’s Dark Blue World (though he did cameo in that one). Instead, Lenka Termerová leads the cast as Věra, a septuagenarian widow who says goodbye to her recently-deceased husband at Olšany Cemetery in the film’s opening scene.
Věra doesn’t have much time to grieve. Shortly after burying her husband, she experiences a fainting spell that forces her frazzled daughter (Petra Špalková) to return to Prague from Belgium. An MRI reveals a brain tumor, and surgery is scheduled in the coming months. But even if the procedure succeeds, Věra may never be quite the same afterward, and an assisted living facility looms somewhere on the horizon.
Going through old photographs, Věra becomes fixated on memories of sailing trips she once took off the Greek coast with a small group of close friends. So she approaches them with a proposition: one final voyage together before it’s too late.
Her companions are all facing their own encroaching realities. Tender Jindra (Oldřich Kaiser), who once harbored feelings for Věra, now suffers from Parkinson’s disease but still agrees to captain the boat. Eman (Petr Kostka) is confined to a wheelchair, while Ruda (Jan Vlasák) has recently been abandoned by his younger husband. Lucie (Dana Syslová), meanwhile, barely recognizes the world around her anymore due to Alzheimer’s, and the group effectively kidnaps her from a memory care facility so she can join them.
Věra, however, has ulterior motives beneath the nostalgia: she quietly imagines the voyage ending not in reconciliation with life, but in a kind of collective farewell.
What a Way to Go derives much of its humor from the indignities and limitations of aging, and Svěrák rarely softens the edges. Jindra’s tremors arrive at inconvenient moments, Eman gets dragged behind the boat after tumbling into the sea, and one especially darkly comic sequence sees the others struggling to pull Věra from the water after a current carries her away. “It’s like the end of The Old Man and the Sea,” Jindra remarks as they tow her alongside their raft, referencing the old man’s inability to haul his big catch aboard. “How did it go for the fish?” Věra asks. “Eaten by sharks.”
The comedy here often comes from precisely the kinds of situations that most films about aging would treat delicately, and while the humor can veer toward the subversive or lowbrow, Svěrák usually—but not always—finds the right tonal balance between cruelty and affection.
The film also gets mileage out of its elderly characters experimenting with marijuana and LSD, courtesy of Ruda’s stash of medicinal substances brought aboard the boat. An extended psychedelic sequence, complete with elements of animation that recalling Svěrák’s Kooky, is among the film’s most visually inventive passages. Some of the humor pushes awkwardly far; a sexual encounter involving Lucie and Ruda drew uproarious laughter at a Prague premiere screening but may alienate some viewers. “Kidnapped, drugged, and shagged by a gay man,” Eman notes. “At least it was consensual.” We’re not entirely sure about that last part.
As the voyage continues and worried children attempt to track their parents down with the help of the Greek coast guard, What a Way to Go begins to resemble a kind of inverted Tokyo Story: rather than being quietly abandoned by society, these seniors embrace their invisibility as an opportunity for one final rebellion, forcing their kids to take notice. Beneath the broad comedy and existential conversations about death, the film is ultimately interested in the question of dignity: whether people facing the erosion of their bodies and minds still retain the right to shape the ending of their own story.
Svěrák manages to balance broad comedy, melancholy, and moments of genuine existential anxiety without letting the film collapse under its own weight. The screenplay doesn’t quite possess the emotional precision of his earlier collaborations with his father, and some thematic conversations become overly explicit. But the performances are uniformly excellent, especially Kaiser, who grounds the film’s darker ideas in warmth and lived-in humanity.
The Greek locations, beautifully photographed by cinematographer František Svěrák, the director’s son, also lend the film a welcome sense of openness and escape rarely seen in contemporary mainstream Czech cinema. The bright Mediterranean waters and sun-drenched coastlines create an appealing contrast with the film’s heavy subject matter, giving these characters a final adventure that genuinely feels liberating, even as mortality hangs over every scene.
What a Way to Go may not rank among Jan Svěrák’s very best films, but it’s an engaging, funny, and occasionally subversive late-life road movie that approaches aging with more honesty than sentimentality. Even when the film drifts into uneven waters, that humanity keeps it afloat.
