Age old questions

Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall in Queen At Sea. Calder-Marshall: 'It is extraordinary to fully focus on people with dementia and go right inside them' Photo: Seafaring

Queen At Sea comes after a long writing/directing gap for Lance Hammer, whose first film, the Deep South set Ballast, won the Sundance US Dramatic Competition prize back in 2008, before going on to play in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. His follow up, which played in competition at the German festival this year, and won him a Silver Bear Jury Prize, is set a world away from his first, in London suburbia. There, Leslie and Martin (Anna Calder-Marshall and Tom Courtenay putting in devastatingly good performances that saw them both win Silver Bears) are struggling to cope with Leslie’s decline due to Alzheimer’s.

Leslie’s daughter Amanda (Juliette Binoche) also isn’t handling things with her mother and stepfather well. We meet them at the moment when Amanda walks in on the pair having sex and explodes not only because she doesn’t believe her mother is able to give consent any longer but because she believed Martin had agreed with this and was going to refrain from bedroom activity. So angry that she calls the police, this sets in train a bureaucratic chain of events that run alongside the frictions within the family in a film that avoids easy dichotomies of wrong and right in favour of a more complex consideration of the family’s dilemmas.

The main cast members spoke about the complex issues considered by the film at a press conference in Berlin.

Lance Hammer with his Silver Bear Jury Prize. The director says: 'Accuracy is extraordinarily important' Photo: Courtesy of Berlinale

Hammer says: “It’s about agency and consent and when, when is someone's agency taken from them or robbed from them, either by the illness or by somebody else, an institution, a family member And when is that decided and and what how is it determined and who's the best person to determine that or the best institution to determine determine that? I don’t know.”

Courtney adds: “I think this was a very hard thing for Juliette’s character to deal with because she knows perfectly. Well how much he loves his wife but he's not able to look after her. That house with all those stairs, the feeding, he's not up to it. He can't look after her but he believes he can because he loves her. But that's unfortunately not quite the end of the story.”

“Amanda never questions the love,” adds Hammer. “She's seeing what Martin may not be able to see because it's happening so gradually – the decline into dementia – or that he may not want to see so he’s repressing it or in denial about it. He doesn't believe he’s harming her but he actually may be and Amanda has the clearest eyes, she thinks, and no actions are being taken. So the burden falls, unfortunately, on her shoulders to take action, which will cause harm to somebody and she knows that. But the best thing she sees is it's important to protect her mother from something that her mother may not be able to express because dementia has taken her ability to articulate if she's experiencing distress. She initiates the act, sometimes, often in fact, and that's a common thing that does happen but it's still not clear that it’s in her best interest to do it, and maybe causing her harm anyway. Martin may not understand that and Juliette's having to make the very difficult choice to take action.”

Speaking about the casting, Courtenay says: “One of the cleverest things I’ve ever done in my career was to find Anna for this film.”

For her part, Calder-Marshall said: “I went to a lot of care homes and studied people with dementia. I’m at an age, I'm afraid when I haven't had a facelift so I am thought of often as a demented old lady but not as extraordinary as this. So I have been to quite a few other care homes to do other parts but this really psyched me and the trust that was put in me by Lance and Tom. It is extraordinary to fully focus on people with dementia and go right inside them. It is fascinating and I wanted to dare to go as deeply as possible because I think it's something that must be shared and considered. Also, my husband has got dementia, so I’ve had a lot of background through that.”

Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay in Queen At Sea. Binoche says she was touched by director Lance Hammer's 'search for authenticity' Photo: Seafaring

Hammer adds: “It was exhaustively researched. The story idea came to me because I was hearing multiple stories all at once and it felt like, what's the universe telling me? I have to pay attention to this.So, it was news articles, it was personal friends, parents, many things. I have some personal experience, not with my parents, but somebody very dear to me, so I had an emotional connection to it. I understood the emotionality of the grieving and the length of the process and the suffering of the families. But this was not the experience of my friend. And so the story was a composite of many different stories I was hearing.”

The director says that they had an extensive workshopping process that involved professionals who deal with these issues, which led to them “exhaustively” re-writing the script and even casting some of those within the film, including Leslie’s carer. He adds: “Accuracy is extraordinarily important, especially with a film like this where the subject is as sensitive as this.”

Binoche was the first to sign up to the project, and says she was touched by Hammer’s “search for authenticity”.

Hammer says: “Juliette is a woman of action and patience. She scraped us up off the ground several times and saved us. It wouldn’t have been made without that. It was just the two of us in the wilderness for the longest time.”

Queen At Sea will be distributed in the UK by Curzon