Queen at Sea: Sexual Consent, Dementia and Bureaucratic Fiat Clash in Drama of Youth vs Age
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
The opening shot of Lance Hammer’s drama, Queen at Sea, is of an elderly man from behind. Martin (Tom Courtenay) and his wife Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall) in winter coats, climbing two flights of stairs, up from a lower level to the street.
He props himself up with a cane, she grips the handrail. By the time they have reached the top they seem precariously high before they disappear out of sight.
Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall in Queen at Sea
In a sense, Queen at Sea is a movie about taking steps and missteps. In the film’s second scene, the couple’s daughter, Amanda (Juliette Binoche), a professor from Newcastle undergoing a sabbatical year, arrives along with her teenaged grand-daughter, Sara (Florence Hunt) to a London townhouse. They let themselves in and call out.
When they hear no answer, they ascend two more flights of flight of stairs. Amanda opens the door to a bedroom, where they see Martin, naked from the waste down, having sex with her mother. Amanda rushes forward to check on her mother who is staring open-mouthed into space. She turns to Martin in fury: “I told you I was going to call the police if you didn’t stop, but you just keep doing it.”
The problem is that Leslie has dementia and her doctor says she can no longer legally consent to having sex. Martin tries to argue, but Amanda heads back down the stairs, and makes the call. Uniformed police arrive at the house, not just to give Martin a warning as Amanda had hoped, but to arrest him. A woman investigator takes Leslie to a hospital where a nurse subjects the frightened woman to a rape kit assessment.
All of this feels unnervingly realistic. Like many of the professionals in the film, the medical and legal roles are played by people who do these jobs in real life. The deliberate framing, the detached camera distance (handled by Train Dreams cinematographer, Adolpho Veloso) and the pervasive white walls emphasize a coolly clinical perspective as the legal and medical bureaucratic machinery takes over the family’s lives. You are in the system, there is no easy exit.
Leslie is moved to a care home, which, after a brief promising start, goes very wrong when Leslie, half-dressed is seen wandering from another patient’s room. Amanda is forced to recognize that the one person Leslie can connect to is Martin, who feeds, clothes and sleeps beside her. He agrees not to have sex with her again, though the relationship will face one more wrenching turn.
Though Queen at Sea is not a movie that aims to comfort or uplift, its ambitions go beyond giving audiences an emotional beating. More than other well-known dementia movies (Michael Haneke’s Amour, Gaspar Noé’s Vortex, Sarah Polley’s Away from Her) it’s easy to identify it’s about a specific social issue. Hammer has said he has been working on the script for a decade (his only previous film was 2008’s Sundance-winning Ballast) and the events depicted have obvious similarities to the 2015 trial of Henry Layhons, a 78-year-old Iowa man who was accused by his stepdaughter of sexually abusing her mother, a case that brought wide attention to the ethical complexity of dementia and sexual consent.
As the title Queen at Sea, suggest, it’s not about the in-between places, Binoche’s character lives between cities, is ending a marriage, and is caught between ethical priorities. The film itself emphasizes life’s bookends of youth and age.
The default, minimalist, static cinematographic approach disappears in scenes that feature the character of Sara (Hunt is part of the cast of the series Bridgerton). It gives way to a free-wheeling handheld camera, as she embarks on her own adult life, and a romance with a goofily sweet classmate, James (Cody Molko).
In contrast, the austere visual field that surrounds Amanda and the older couple has an effect akin to allowing us to watch actors on a bare stage, where we are drawn in by the authenticity of the performances, reportedly developed through extensive workshops and rehearsals. Binoche, always effortlessly natural, is a figure of flurried anxiety, struggling to deal with the messy consequences of her decisions.
Tom Courtenay, who came to fame as the cornerstone actor of the early sixties’ British New Wave (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner Billy Liar), at 89 still carries echoes of defensive male anger, but also delicate tenderness. As the mother, Calder-Marshall says few words. Like the other characters, we work to decode the evanescent play of expressions on her face – angry, hungry, frightened, comforted, bewildered.
Queen at Sea. Directed and written by Lance Hammer. Starring Juliette Binoche, Tom Courtenay, Anna Calder-Marshall, and Florence Hunt. In theatres November 6.