After an 18-year hiatus following his acclaimed Sundance debut, Ballast, filmmaker Lance Hammer has returned with his sophomore feature. Hammer has expressed that his long break from filmmaking stemmed from a lack of desire to create “commercially viable” work; he instead chose to wait until he could craft a small-scale film around a meaningful story. The film that resulted from Hammer’s nearly two-decade sabbatical is Queen at Sea, a wrenching drama about the irresolvable moral dilemmas that emerge when caring for a loved one with dementia. Elapsed time aside, the surface details of Ballast and Queen at Sea are quite distinct. Ballast is a verité-inflected depiction of rural poverty and frayed familial bonds among Black Americans in the South, cast with non-professional actors and shot with low-resolution, handheld digital cinematography. In Queen at Sea, which won a Silver Bear Jury Prize at the Berlinale, Hammer takes a more upscale-coded approach. Its most visible characteristics check all the boxes for the festival-and-arthouse circuit: the London-set film focuses on bourgeois Europeans, is shot on pristine 35mm, and is cast with many-laureled screen veterans.
The superficial distinctions between these two films belie Hammer’s remarkable consistency in his moral rigor and refined aesthetic judgment. Ballast may seem to embody all the stereotypical hallmarks of its era’s low-budget American indie filmmaking, yet its power lies largely in its immaculately crafted compositions and the reverberating ambiguities of its carefully cultivated narrative; likewise, the prestige trappings of Queen at Sea are only set dressing for the emotionally ravaging and formally rigorous film that the director has crafted. Hammer’s cinema proves to be one of totalizing humanism; here, even more so than in Ballast, he probes intensely vulnerable interpersonal struggles that offer no clear solutions, and in doing so reveals torment and grace in equal measure.
Queen at Sea opens with a jarring encounter that sets a high-stakes moral struggle into motion: Amanda (Juliette Binoche), with her teenage daughter Sara (Florence Hunt) in tow, walks in on her elderly stepfather Martin (Tom Courtenay) having sex with her mother Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall). Amanda’s incensed reaction evinces that she has come upon similar scenes before, and she follows through on a threat to call the police on Martin. The issue at heart is that Leslie is in the throes of late-stage dementia. Amanda is horrified that Martin continues to have sex with Leslie when her capacity for consent is diminished at best, while Martin maintains that physical contact is healthy and that Leslie often initiates sex. The police’s actions — they arrest Martin, conduct a rape test on Leslie, and designate their bedroom a crime scene — infuriate Martin and distress Amanda, but this incursion of the state is only one stage of the ongoing familial struggle that ensues. Amanda has power of attorney for her mother, and must make decisions on her behalf without knowing how Leslie truly feels. Should she move Leslie to a memory care unit? Should she hire an in-home nurse? Should she move Leslie to her own home in Newcastle, or should stay in London so that Leslie and Martin do not have to be uprooted? Amanda makes a seemingly unending series of agonizing judgment calls with the hope of helping her mother, yet each time unforeseen consequences ensue, both for Leslie and the entire multigenerational family.
Hammer — who directed, wrote, edited, and produced the film — developed Queen at Sea through a lengthy workshop and rehearsal period with the cast. Judging by the lived-in performances and thoughtfully constructed narrative, Hammer’s process proved an astute one. Binoche delivers a characteristically layered and emotionally transparent performance; one standout scene impeccably captures Amanda’s emotional overwhelm just through a long shot of Binoche’s face reflected in a rearview car mirror. Courtenay and Calder-Marshall — who won a shared Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance at the Berlinale, and whose working relationship began with a 1968 stage production of Hamlet — embody their character’s intimate relationship with startling acuity, committing completely to the profound tenderness and extreme weakness that their roles require. In a loosely connected subplot, Sara experiences the rush of a first sexual relationship, and Hunt plays these scenes with spontaneity and ease, enlivening a narrative counterpoint that becomes increasingly poignant as Leslie and Martin decline.
Hammer stitches these three interwoven narratives with a sharp editorial eye and a keen understanding of narrative development. The outwardly radiating pain of Leslie’s condition escalates both with the progressive development of her dementia and with each consequential decision that Amanda makes; Hammer turns the screws on his characters with incremental intensification to maximum effect, yet without any hint of gratuitous misery — the focus always remains on the central characters’ complex humanity, rather than their suffering alone. Hammer and director of photography Adolpho Veloso stage many scenes in static long shots, and often at unexpected angles; for example, at an emotional high point, an actor may face away from the camera or stand in the corner of the frame. These crisp compositions, typically naturally lit, possess inherent visual and dramatic interest, and lend a quality of distanced but interested observation that aligns with Hammer’s patient and precise narrative structure.
Hammer and Veloso’s formal discipline, and the actors’ collective skill, focus the viewer’s attention on events that are discomfiting at best and tragic at worst. Hammer never looks away from the most distressing aspects of the story, yet he does provide grace to his characters through a subtle strand of gentleness and care. For instance, where a lesser filmmaker might situate Amanda and Martin as diametric enemies, here Hammer portrays them as close family members whose bond is at once tender and tumultuous. The four central characters’ actions are ultimately grounded in deep mutual love, making their collective inability to arrive at a resolution both all the more upsetting and all the more human.
A late exchange between Amanda and Martin is perhaps the closest Hammer comes to articulating a path forward for his characters (and, by extension, anyone caring for loved ones in states of ill health and incapacitation). Amanda fears that Leslie will remain “completely vulnerable,” and Martin asks: “What if we just accept that?” What Hammer ultimately suggests is that to accept vulnerability — whether physical and emotional, and no matter how extreme — is to accept one’s own humanity. Hammer looks head-on at the human condition in its most fragile state in Queen at Sea, and the results are bracing yet unwaveringly empathetic, cementing Hammer as an uncompromising artist of stark insight.
DIRECTOR: Lance Hammer; CAST: Juliette Binoche, Tom Courtenay, Anna Calder-Marshall, Florence Hunt, Steven Cree; DISTRIBUTOR: Greenwich Entertainment; IN THEATERS: October 30; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 1 min.
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