Queen at Sea asks who can speak for a woman whose ability to answer has become hard to read. It gives the question to people with intimate knowledge of her and good reasons to doubt the conclusions each of them draws from it. Anna Calder-Marshall plays Leslie, a woman with advanced dementia. Tom Courtenay is Martin, her husband. Juliette Binoche’s Amanda comes into their home as Leslie’s daughter, with a relationship that has a different history and confers a different kind of claim. The home is familiar to all three. That familiarity supplies very little common ground once somebody has to decide how to act.
Lance Hammer is unusually careful about the time it takes for help to become an intervention. A person who steps into another couple’s arrangements may have a compelling reason to do it and still understand less about the shape of an ordinary day than either of the people living there. The film makes that possibility felt without turning it into an argument for leaving the couple alone. Amanda can see something requiring an answer. She also has to act in a situation where it may take a very long time to find out what an answer does.
A call to the police changes the shape of a family dispute with particular abruptness. Amanda has a reason to need help and a particular idea of what help might achieve. Once other people have duties of their own, she has much less ability to set the limits of the response. Binoche can register the growing difficulty of explaining why she called without sounding as though she has made a complete judgment about Martin. The call is a strong structural choice because it allows an act of care to acquire consequences the person making it did not choose.
Courtenay is able to suggest an enormous accumulation of domestic work in the way Martin takes up a position beside Leslie. That history changes the sound of his confidence. Knowing the details of another person’s needs can be the deepest form of attention a partner has to offer. It can also make him too quick to assume he knows what an ambiguous response means. Calder-Marshall has the most demanding work in the film. She gives Leslie an existence that is visible in gestures of varying availability to the people looking at her. Some of what they see can plausibly belong to Leslie alone.
The introduction of medical and institutional procedures changes the language available to the family. There are serious reasons for asking a direct question, writing down an answer and establishing who was in a room. Hammer has a feeling for the moments when those tools are both necessary and helpless before the relationship they describe. Amanda has to find words that people can act on. Martin hears descriptions of a life he believes he understands in finer detail. The distance between those reactions is often more moving than the immediate prospect of a decision.
Amanda’s daughter Sara gives the film a quieter route into the question of what gets passed on through a family. A granddaughter can receive versions of a story from adults who have their own reasons to make it coherent. She also has occasions to pay attention to Leslie without needing the contact to furnish an argument. Florence Hunt’s presence makes a different pace of looking available. This is important in a film that has good reasons to dwell on the judgments being made by adults. The ability to spend a few minutes with Leslie before deciding what the minutes mean has a value of its own.
The film’s restraint has a cost. A viewer can want to know more about the years through which Leslie and the others acquired the habits now being scrutinized. Hammer’s refusal to furnish the past with decisive evidence preserves a harder uncertainty in the present. Nobody can play back a whole marriage before deciding how to care for a woman today. Queen at Sea is exact about how much affection survives inside that problem and how little authority affection gives any one person to settle it.
