Miss Sixty (2014)

On her 60th birthday, after forty years at the Bertrand-Kruger Institute, molecular biologist Luise Jansen is fired by her boss and former lover, Bernhard. The decision comes after she broke her rival Marlies’s thumb at work when Marlies tried to use Luise’s centrifuge without asking. As a farewell gift, Marlies gives Luise the frozen eggs that Luise had had frozen at the institute for research purposes twenty years earlier. She uses her newfound free time to take long walks in the park. There she meets Frans, a gallery owner temporarily immobilized by lumbago, who asks her to take him to the hospital in his distress. A lover of young women who is having an affair with his intern, Romy, Frans lives in a shared apartment with his son Max, an editor, and is desperately chasing after his youth. Luise, who lives with her mother Doris and sees life in retirement as a punishment, becomes fixated on the idea that her eggs can finally fulfill her long-held wish to become a mother. While searching for “average sperm,” she comes across Max, who donated sperm to a sperm bank years earlier. When she secretly follows him, she is horrified to discover that he is Frans’s son. The next day, when Luise and Frans happen to meet again at a department store, they decide to have dinner together. Although at first they can barely stand each other, they begin to trust one another over a bottle of wine and become friends. After an evening together, they eventually sleep together a few days later. Despite the feelings beginning to emerge, they go their separate ways when Luise refuses to let Frans talk her out of becoming a mother after all. When Doris unexpectedly dies a short time later, Luise falls into a deep depression. Frans, having heard about Doris’s death, visits Luise at home, where he happens upon Max’s profile from the sperm bank. The two argue again. A few days later, Luise, who is planning a fresh start in another city, visits him at his gallery to apologize and tell him she has abandoned her plans to become a mother. Frans realizes that he has already fallen in love and confesses his feelings to Luise shortly before she leaves. Together, they let Luise’s eggs drift down the Rhine.