Queen at Sea Review – A deeply sad dementia drama that delivers a stunning portrait of intimacy | film

THis haunting and indescribably sad story — which features angry, complex, and brilliant late-career performances from Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder Marshall — is about dementia, the end of care and the decisions that must be made when the spousal caregiver is as frail as the patient (and who has the right to make those decisions). It has to do with the nature of the intimate relationship between the two; The moment this becomes a problem for children the adults have a conflicting sense of their responsibilities.

Queen at Sea is directed by American independent director Lance Hammer, absent since his 2008 Sundance winner, Ballast. It’s a powerful comeback, a ripping film that bears comparison to Michael Haneke’s Amour or Gaspar Noe’s Vortex. It concludes with a heartbreakingly sarcastic and ambiguous final sequence that rejects the traditional final beat. A double portrait of love, contrasting the pleasures and expectations of intimacy across generations.

The setting is bleak and wintry London, with a porridge gray cloud cover. Juliette Binoche plays Amanda, a recently divorced academic. She has taken time off with her teenage daughter Sarah (Florence Hunt) to be closer to her elderly mother Leslie (Calder Marshall) – who suffers from dementia – and her stepfather Martin (Courtenay).

One dull weekday morning, she looked at Martin and Leslie, and noticed them having sex, with a mask of incomprehension on her mother’s face. She angrily accuses him of raping Leslie. Clearly, the shock and disgust stems on some level from the fact that he is her stepfather and not her father. And also because they had already received GP advice that Lesley could no longer give meaningful consent.

However, Martin has conducted his own online research contradicting this, claiming that marital sex comforts dementia patients as much as all the other things done to them without meaningful consent: food, shelter, medical care. Most importantly, it also relaxes the caregiver. He loves his wife and this is a vital way to keep this alive.

Very angry, Amanda calls the police, which sets in motion the train events she almost immediately regrets. Martin is forbidden from seeing Leslie, who is terrified by the rape test and grotesquely confused as to why her husband is not there. The only way to put the legal action on hold is for Leslie to go into foster care, which is what Amanda has long requested. This is vehemently resisted by Martin, who now sees all of this as a malicious and dishonest way to force the situation on them – be it the foster home, or the cops – and a permanent stain on his character no matter the outcome. Meanwhile, Sarah develops a relationship with a boy at her new school in London that her mother knows nothing about.

The story moves from one difficult and painfully ambiguous situation to the next – each a terrifying point of no return, each a terrible occasion for things to be seen and said that cannot be unseen or unsaid. Is Amanda right to take the view that she somehow mishandled things? Is Martin an abuser of the most evil and hateful kind, or is he just misunderstood? Is the nursing home itself a bad place? Even the crisis involved, linked to the unspeakable facts about the sexuality of older people and their propensity for abuse, does not exactly resolve the question. Everything that happens, every station of the cross, every unbearable adversity, is merely a function of the general situation, which can only be managed to some extent.

The core of the film is a four-way conversation between social worker Amanda, Martin and Leslie. This includes Martin’s emotional and tearful declaration of love for his wife and best friend. A virtual reaffirmation of the vows, which Leslie poignantly repeats. Did dementia make her assertion worthless? Queen at Sea is a film with a wintry, tragic frankness.