The difficulty of dealing with aging parents is about to become a full-on crisis. It might already be happening: In the United States, for example, an aging population requires more care, while home health and personal care aides—one of the fastest-growing jobs in the country—have a median salary of just $35,800 a year. Something has to give, and that is before individual families deal with the moral and ethical minefield of what that entails. Queen at Sea, a challenging new drama from Lance Hammer (his first feature since 2008’s Ballast), pulls no punches in the tough, borderline impossible situation he depicts. Like Michael Haneke’s Amour, which dealt with a similar subject, Hammer makes his unblinking approach tolerable through courageous performances and a fierce commitment to the fraught path his characters take.
Juliette Binoche stars as Amanda, a professor in London on sabbatical while she helps out with her ailing mother, Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall), who has advanced dementia. Hammer wastes almost no time with a dramatic escalation: Amanda walks in on Leslie having sex with her stepfather, Martin (the reliably excellent Tom Courtenay), and Amanda chastises him immediately. The look on Leslie’s face shocks Amanda, and she says Leslie is in no position to give him her consent (this has happened before). Left with no recourse, Amanda calls the police, only she does not anticipate the procedures for a sexual assault investigation, to say nothing of what Martin’s subsequent arrest means for Leslie’s care. After Martin returns from the police station, things only deteriorate further and the relationship between him and Amanda—which was icy to begin with—gets much more hostile.
What prevents this from being outright misery porn is Hammer’s sense of detail. The emotional toll of all this is put on hold while the authorities go through the motions, interviewing all the relevant parties, and then there is the practical matter of Amanda watching Leslie while the police hold Martin. Queen at Sea has sympathy for everyone involved, including the investigators, while also showing how pride and defiance puts all of them at an impasse. Martin is unapologetic about his conduct with Leslie, reasoning that it is she and not him who instigates sex, while Amanda must navigate what devoted marriage means for a pair like this. Hammer also serves as editor, and he opts for brusque cuts that never sensationalize what happens. Even the scenes of mental deterioration with Leslie are never heartbreaking because, for her loved ones, they have already had to say goodbye to the woman she was.
Another important character is Amanda’s teenage daughter, Sara (Florence Hunt), who was also present when Amanda interrupts Leslie and Martin. Sara has an incomplete sense of what is happening, which presents another challenge for Amanda because she is still a caregiver for her kid. Binoche is a brilliant actor, and here she conveys the deep weariness from realizing that her attention can only go so far in any direction. No histrionics or big speeches, just an exhausted woman whose love and devotion ultimately are a finite resource, and all the guilt/pain that entails. Binoche has not had an English-language performance this good in years.
There is also an interesting subplot where, left to her own devices, Sara meets a boy and experiments with sex. Hammer shoots this matter-of-factly, showing how intoxicating carefree affection can be. At first, these scenes seem like an afterthought, a story entirely separate from what is happening with Sara’s grandmother, then Hammer starts to find parallels through how he edits it together. He suggests that sex, no matter the age, is an essential part of life, one that comes with responsibility that makes the elderly closer to literal children than older adults. Queen at Sea is careful about seeing Martin and Amanda’s point of view in this disagreement, and resolves it in another detail-rich sequence where Amanda convinces Martin to put Leslie into a care facility. That solution ultimately proves to be temporary, a stark reminder that many families all over are fumbling their way through challenges like this that have no easy answers.
Queen at Sea may be too rough and demanding for some viewers. Hammer never relents in how he depicts Leslie, like offering a brief moment where we get a sense of the woman she once was. She is too far gone for that, a different person entirely, so Hammer’s drama is more about striking a balance between practical demands of eldercare with basic needs for human dignity. If the film is painful, then that pain is in service of riveting drama, one that pulls no punches and includes a breathtaking ending that balances surprise with inevitability. More than 20 years ago, The Notebook was a hit in part because of how it added sentimental romance to a story of devotion and memory loss. Perhaps Hammer revisited The Notebook and noticed how its treacly storytelling could hurt families who saw no sentimentality in dementia because they had to actually live through it. For Hammer and his actors, anything less would be maudlin or dishonest.
Queen at Sea (R, 121 mins.) opens at the Angelika Mosaic on Nov. 13.
