The great French actress can look at the world around her so naturally that no matter what character she’s playing (whether in Rendezvous, Flight of the Red Balloon, Summer Hours, Certified Cop, Camille Claudel 1915, Let the Sunshine In, Winter Boy, The Taste of Things, or in her Oscar-winning role in The English Patient), she presents a woman in a mode of inquiry.

In Queen at Sea, Binoche portrays middle-aged Amanda, a Frenchwoman living in England who is juggling a marital separation, a teenage daughter, a professorship, and her aged and senile mother, for whom she is responsible. Each aspect of troubled conscience contributes to Amanda/Binoche’s natural beauty. Binoche is a French version of the intelligence and sophistication associated with Irene Dunne in such films as The Awful Truth, Theodora Goes Wild, and Unfinished Business.

The considerable dramatic conflicts in Queen at Sea would be chaotic without Binoche to guide us through. As devised and directed by American filmmaker Lance Hammer, Queen at Sea catches the obstacles faced by Amanda and those closest to her. Starting with Amanda’s shock when she checks in on her senescent mother Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall) and stepfather Martin (Tom Courtenay), only to discover the seniors in flagrante delicto, Hammer’s method is both confrontational and complexly personal. Amanda reacts politically, calling in the state apparatus to resolve unexpected domestic issues. She’s alarmed by consensual sexuality that doesn’t meet her preference. “If we don’t get some help, it will overwhelm us,” she tells her stepfather, whose most eloquent response is to look at her with surprise, then steely anger.

Amanda interferes like the most aggravating Karen in contemporary cinema. But that’s precisely Hammer’s point and Binoche’s artistic venture. Queen at Sea brings to light the imperiousness of that has seized contemporary Western life. Acting out of her own uncertainty, Amanda would be a dislikable pedant, except that she is steadfast and loving in her intentions toward her mother, her stepfather, and her daughter Sara (Florence Hunt) who, in Hammer’s balanced narrative contrast, is just beginning to discover her own sexual nature.

Queen at Sea is a schematic exercise from the first shot of the elderly Leslie and Martin slowly climbing up a public staircase. Everything is a negotiation with progress. That was also the problem with Hammer’s previous film, Ballast (2008), the condescending racial drama set in the American South. Since then, Hammer has been on an artistic sabbatical, teaching in academia until he made this second feature. Like Binoche, Hammer is also in a mode of inquiry, which comes through when Amanda, in professor-speak, belittles Martin’s intimacy with Leslie: “This disinhibition is a consequence of the disease eroding the areas of the brain used to keep the primal instincts in check.”

Martin responds rationally: “Why are you so keen to deprive her of something that gives her comfort, pleasure at a time in her life when she needs them most?” This is a genuinely difficult dilemma, such as few contemporary films have dared. Hammer achieves a level of respectable compassion, yet one can’t help longing for Mike Leigh to step in and rescue it all.

Queen at Sea raises an essential question: Must movies be variations on social issues, or personal experience? Hammer’s art-minded condescension was transparent in Ballast, but it’s more effective here in compositions that depict the emotional friction between Amanda and Sara through Mondrian squares and distance — the space observed on the retirement-home surveillance monitors that capture Leslie’s sexual abuse. Montages of Sara and her wild-haired friends exploring their sexuality pay homage to Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. (The teens express their “fear of the sublime” while literally searching the world’s structure to find responsibility or freedom.) Through Amanda’s frustration, Lesley’s quiet, and Sara’s naïveté, Hammer probes the sexual intimacy that most feminist filmmakers don’t articulate. (Martin and the male experience are sidelined.)

That the politicization of cinema has been ruinous is apparent in how Queen at Sea improves on such age-themed films as of Away from Her, 45 Years, and Under the Skin. The empathic Hammer rejects the nihilism of Michael Haneke’s Amour, which Americans mistook for a geriatric love story. Inspired by an actress from the French tradition of sexual candor, an empath like Hammer can only provide a heroine who thinks her way past this era’s political clichés.

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