Lance Hammer’s UK-set drama Queen at Sea is tagged “Family is complicated” by the Berlinale’s helpful path-finding system, which guides festival audiences through the hundreds of movies on display. No sh*t! The oblique mood title does little more to prepare us for the exact nature of the complications this particular family unit is facing, and they are laid out, starkly and without any further ado, in the opening moments. It’s a staggeringly bold gambit, but the two grounded, laser-focused leads — Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay — help navigate us through the intimate and surprisingly complex moral maze about to unfold.
Binoche is Amanda Powell, a Frenchwoman living in North London with her teenage daughter Sara (Florence Hunt) after separating from her husband. She’s a professor with tenure, taking time out to write a book while caring for her artist mother Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall), who has dementia. When Amanda stops by to visit her, she is shocked to find her stepfather Martin Carville (Courtenay) mounted on top of his seemingly immobile wife, mid-coitus — and not for the first time, apparently. “You just keep doing it,” wails Amanda.
This time, Amanda decides to take things further and calls the police, possibly in an attempt to give Martin a final warning. Unfortunately, once the law is involved, a crime has to be reported, setting in motion a chain of events that are extremely upsetting to the old lady, starting with an intrusive internal examination. Martin, meanwhile, is told to vacate the premises, which he staunchly refuses to do. “You seem to think your mother doesn’t want sex,” he says, defending his right to make love to his wife of 18 years, thinking of it as therapy for her.
The fact that Martin has a stash of Viagra doesn’t seem to help his case, and for a short while it seems that he’s going to be the villain of the piece, taking advantage of a vulnerable woman who can’t consent. Hammer’s film, however, is about to go much deeper into the reality of the situation. It transpires that Martin actually loves his wife very much, making her breakfast every morning and ensuring she takes her meds. In fact, it is Leslie that tries to initiate the sex, and becomes distressed when Martin refuses her. A sit-down with a mediator is incredibly touching, revealing how the pair first met, at a classical concert in Paris.
After its attention-grabbing opening, Queen at Sea sails into more familiar territory, of the kind chartered by Gaspar Noé in Vortex and, more pertinently, Michael Haneke in Love. A more extreme comparison, however, could be David Cronenberg’s The Fly, since it’s a story about the tragedy of trying to love someone who is physically and mentally disintegrating in front of your eyes and will very soon become a complete stranger. Sensing this, Amanda decides, perhaps correctly, that Martin’s sexual desire is actually a form of fear, telling him, “You’re in denial about how quickly she’s declining.”
Hammer leavens the central drama with a subplot involving Amanda’s daughter Sara and her burgeoning love affair with a local boy, emphasizing Amanda’s dilemma, having to play mother to her mother and let her little girl go. But it’s a distraction from the main attraction, which is the palpable chemistry onscreen between Binoche and her 88-year-old co-star Courtenay, with a phenomenal performance that, for once, really can be called fearless. Cinematographer Adolpho Velso captures their saber-rattling with soft lighting and asymmetric framing that, fittingly, comes across as both warm and oddly alienating.
Given the subject matter, it can’t end well — and indeed it doesn’t, no matter how much money and effort the family try to throw at it (everyone here is modestly wealthy, as evidenced by the spacious Carville home). But this is a film about facing facts, and, as tough as it is to watch, its hard truths hit home.
Title: Queen At Sea
Festival: Berlin (Competition)
Director/Screenwriter: Lance Hammer
Cast: Juliette Binoche, Tom Courtenay, Anna Calder-Marshall, Florence Hunt
Sales: The Match Factory
Running time: 2 hrs 1 min