There are some movies, including Queen at Sea, which are so disturbing they can only be watched once. Fortunately Queen at Sea is so well made that its care and consideration makes its brutally tough topic easier to handle. This is why it won the Silver Bear Jury Prize at this year’s Berlinale. In addition Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall jointly won the Berlinale’s Best Supporting Performance award, which is entirely justified. It has been an extremely long time since anyone, much less two people, have provided braver or more physically raw performances. But this rawness and bravery means that Queen at Sea is, by any definition of the word, obscene. It depicts parts of the human body that no one should ever see, and yet as people age these obscenities are unavoidable parts of daily life. It is a brutal horror story, one of the most nightmarish that anyone could imagine, and yet it’s also an ordinary one. This is all high praise, but this review is also a warning.
The French Leslie (Ms. Calder-Marshall) and the English Martin (Mr. Courtenay) have been married for nearly twenty years and live in a wealthy part of north London in an apartment full of steep staircases. Their marriage is happy, in spite of Leslie’s dementia, which has gotten considerably worse. As a result Leslie’s adult daughter Amanda (Juliette Binoche) has taken a sabbatical from her academic career in the north of England and moved to a nearby but less fancy part of London to be closer to them. Amanda also has a teenage daughter, Sara (Florence Hunt), whose father is in Canada. There is no question that Martin is a tender and loving husband, who provides the physical and mental care for Leslie that she needs in order to function day to day. Amanda trusts Martin totally, with one single exception: he will not stop having sex with Leslie.
The movie begins with Amanda and Sara walking in on them in bed and Amanda being so disturbed that she calls the police. Once this nuclear option has been deployed, the wheels of state begin moving. It’s clear Leslie cannot truly consent to anything, but it’s debatable whether she is being harmed. Martin is adamant that he would never harm Leslie, but Amanda is just as adamant that his continuing to sleep with her is harmful. All the police and social workers are kind and good at their jobs, but this is the kind of awful dilemma no one has an easy answer for. Martin’s close care and attention for Leslie, the routines of their life and the familiarity of their home has managed to mitigate the worst of her illness until now. Those routines being upset – even with all the goodwill in the world and for her own protection – risks everything. Leslie loves Martin, in moments of lucidity calls him her best friend, and there is absolutely no question that she is well cared for. Martin hasn’t even been out of the flat without her for years, for pity’s sake. And as Martin says repeatedly, a man having sex with his wife when she wants him to is no crime. Amanda is equally clear that her mother can no longer consent to anything, her sexual urges are merely a symptom of her worsening dementia and that her bodily autonomy must be protected. But Amanda has made her life with Sara in another city, visiting only for the holidays, while Martin has been there with Leslie every single day for years, and years, and years. What the best way forward here, especially when the police are involved, no one really knows.
In the meantime, Sara is learning her own way around London by going with her new schoolfriends to smoke weed in the park or admire London’s brutalist buildings. There’s a gentle but noticeable theme of brutalism in public spaces, contrasting with the cluttered and awkward Georgian terrace in which Martin and Leslie live. Amanda and Sara are in a sublet on the 21st floor of a towerblock (an apartment building of unusual height for the UK) where the rooms have been painted in primary colors. The boy Sara likes, a sweetheart named James (Cody Molko), also lives in a brutalist home, all angles and windows. These heavy spaces and clean lines are very strong visual metaphors for the emotional disturbances swirling around everybody. So are the overcast and grey London skies. This movie feels so grounded in London that it’s a surprise to learn writer-director Lance Hammer is an American who lives in Los Angeles, and who chose the London setting in order to work with his preferred actors.
The boldness of the work that Mr. Courtenay and Ms. Calder-Marshall do here is nothing short of extraordinary. They agreed to be filmed in circumstances which are some of the most disgusting that anyone could ever put on film. There’s no attempt to protect their own dignity, and no attempt to disguise what it’s like to inhabit a body that’s falling apart. The bravery required to be this honest and ugly is off the charts. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, who was Oscar-nominated for his work on Train Dreams, brings his style of handheld curiosity here too, following everyone around these cramped apartments with a keen and careful eye. Martin’s taste in classical music is also contrasted with the hip-hop that Sara and her friends enjoy.
Possibly the biggest mistake the movie makes is not showing a closer relationship between Martin and Sara, since he’s been married to Leslie for her whole life, and the only grandfather she seems to have. But Ms. Hunt is portraying a young woman who, while she loves her family, is more focused on her own delightful self. She’s a kid in perfect health with her life before her, so all her horrors are to come. It is also clear Ms. Binoche, whose gravitas and reputation do a large part of her work here, ensured Queen at Sea could be made. She has always been a fearless actress, willing to get dirty indeed to portray parts of human experience that others would prefer to ignore, and able to transform her innate quiet anxiety into a woman suddenly realising her mother’s needs are beyond anyone on earth. Fortunately Amanda and Sara have an amiable relationship, and Sara is neither a problem child nor upset that her mother’s attention is not wholly focused on her right now. The rapport between Amanda and Martin, in spite of everything, also feels very real. They are both trying to do their best for Leslie, and they both know their best is not good enough, but what else can they do?
Well. That’s until the movie’s final sequence, which is one of the most obscene that this critic has ever seen. The obscenity is all the more horrifying for being so ordinary, so banal and so easy to imagine. Except we don’t have to imagine it: we are shown an aspect of people’s personal lives that, were it not for their weaknesses, no one would ever be meant to see. It’s a testament to their bravery that Ms. Calder-Marshall and Mr. Courtenay allowed themselves to be filmed in such a ghastly way, which is not the slightest bit gratuitous. Except it is so ghastly, and so hard core in its unflinching commitment to facing up to the consequences of dementia, that Queen at Sea becomes so disturbing that it really can only be watched once. Its excellence is undeniable but it’s very difficult to recommend. Though as the saying goes, old age is not for sissies, and neither is this film.
Queen at Sea recently played at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Berlinale site for the title.
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