The writer and director Lance Hammer’s new feature, “Queen at Sea,” is both a worthy experience in itself and a sharp, if unintended, work of criticism in action: it’s the film that “Fjord” could and should have been. The latter movie, released earlier this month, considers a religious family living in Norway, who endure intrusive legal inquiries and interventions when teachers suspect the parents of inflicting corporal punishment on their children. “Queen at Sea” similarly confronts the intervention of government authority into private lives. It’s the story of an elderly woman in London, Leslie (played by Anna Calder-Marshall), who has dementia, and whose similarly aged husband, Martin (Tom Courtenay), is caught having sex with her by Leslie’s daughter, Amanda (Juliette Binoche). Certain that Leslie is unable to consent, Amanda demands that Martin promise never to have sex with her mother again. Martin refuses, so Leslie calls the police—only to scare him, she later admits, but by then it’s too late. Her call instantly sets a criminal investigation into motion, Martin is arrested, and the household becomes the subject of scrutiny by police and social workers.
Unlike in “Fjord,” which never shows the corporal punishment, however mild, that even the parents avow, “Queen at Sea” explicitly, mere minutes into the movie, shows the sex act as Amanda witnesses it. Hammer honorably and with sincere curiosity puts the family’s own experiences and principles, their ethics and their knowledge, to the test in the face of the power of law. Two officers arrive, and they follow procedure: they seal off the couple’s bedroom as a crime scene and report the case to their superiors, who order technicians in hazmat suits to collect the pair’s bedding and dispatch a sex-crime investigator who insists that Leslie be brought in for a medical examination. For Leslie, who is only vaguely aware of her surroundings, the intimately intrusive procedures are an unbearable ordeal.
Martin, for his part, rejects the premise of Amanda’s outrage: he contends that Leslie, though severely impaired, is nonetheless aware of his identity and presence and, indeed, initiates sex with him. Leslie’s impairment is, in fact, variable; at times, she speaks, tersely but sensibly, and her actions often clearly express reasonable preferences. The elderly couple’s relationship is tight and tender. Leslie has a regular set of daily activities with Martin and hews closely to them (for instance, leading him on their daily walk). When the authorities insist they be kept apart at home, she persistently and unambiguously returns to him.
There’s nothing manospherical or ideological about Martin’s insistence on maintaining sexual relations with Leslie. He’s neither ignorant nor dismissive of the notion of consent; rather, by the nature of his privileged relationship to her, he sincerely and respectfully believes that she has consented. What’s more, the movie puts evidence of this onscreen, although Amanda argues that Leslie is merely reverting to pre-rational and primal instinct. Martin may appear self-serving, but he is also intensely and finely attuned to Leslie and to the gestures and facial expressions by which she communicates. He refuses to rule Leslie outside the pale of connection and consciousness. His belief in her consent and even desire is inseparable from his unwillingness to let go of her and of the mutual bond of their shared life.
Hammer catches decisive moments with understated but telling precision, thanks to the cast’s deeply committed and finely tuned performances (especially Calder-Marshall’s astoundingly infinitesimal transformations and Courtenay’s carefully calibrated fury). During the initial police visit, one of the officers admits to his colleague that he has no idea what to do. (They proceed to do what they’re trained to do: call in the complaint and set the mighty and implacable machine into motion.) After the couple’s sheets and blanket have been confiscated as evidence, Leslie insists on returning to her bed and lies down on the bare mattress. A risk assessor examining the house ruefully considers the height of the stairs, although Leslie, who has lived there for ages, apparently manages them fine, many times a day. Such details capture how bureaucratic power—its inflexible procedures and constraints—have changed the fundamental order of things. Hammer moves stepwise through the drama, sticking to its beats and not delving into its interstices. His cinematic gaze at the couple is fine, patient, and nuanced, though it doesn’t reach the obsessive intimacy and scorched-earth terror of Gaspar Noé’s 2022 film “Vortex”.
The result is a movie that, rather than digging beneath the surface of its machinelike relentlessness, adorns it with literary conceits, above all, its ongoing parallels of three generations of women: Leslie, who has a deeply devoted husband; Amanda, who’s separated from her husband; and Amanda’s daughter, Sarah (Florence Hunt), a teen-ager exploring first love with a classmate named James (Cody Molko). Amanda and Sarah live in Newcastle, where Amanda is a tenured professor; they’re just in London for a year on Amanda’s sabbatical, staying in a barely furnished apartment. Such incidentals get in the way of several more fundamental and analytical details. Instead of the sweet sentimentality of Sarah’s romance, the story practically calls out for its details to be refracted through her sensibility, and that of her generation, in conversation with James and her other friends. (A well-crafted but brief scene in which she broaches the matter with her mother only hints at her unexplored bewilderment.) Moreover, it’s inconceivable that, having been arrested and possibly facing charges, Martin wouldn’t consult a lawyer, yet no lawyer is involved. Furthermore, in a film where the legalities of consent are central, a lawyer’s presence would not only clarify Martin’s risks and possible strategies but also look more broadly at the drama’s emotional, intellectual, and political ramifications. (Plus, a pet peeve: in a pair of scenes, Amanda writes, but what is she writing?)
Still, Hammer shrewdly directs his attention throughout to the inner ravages and outer indignities wrought by Leslie’s affliction, including with the horrifying banality of one possible imposed solution: removal to a care facility and the enforced separation from her husband that this would entail. Where “Fjord” is full of leering political nudges, manipulative sentimentality, and tacit denunciations under the guise of ostensible objectivity, “Queen at Sea” is, at its core, a tragedy. It depicts not a conflict between right and wrong but between two apparent rights—two truths and two forms of justice that are irreconcilable, incompatible, contradictory, and mutually exclusive. For all the film’s distractions, omissions, and short-circuits, Hammer displays a keen eye for devastating ironies, for clearly and plainly imagined events that don’t merely turn the tables but overturn them. The modest candor of his approach is all the more noteworthy for the far-reaching and unsparing world view that it invokes. ♦