Movie Review: In ‘Sorry, Baby,' Eva Victor makes a disarming debut
The first thing to love about writer-director-star Eva Victor's extraordinary debut 'Sorry, Baby' is how she, as the young professor Agnes, tries, and fails, to hide a tryst with her neighbor.
Agnes lives in a quaint New England home where her best friend and fellow former grad student Lydie (Naomi Ackie) is visiting. We are just getting to know each of these characters when a knock comes on the door. Gavin (Lucas Hedges) stands outside confused when Lydie answers. Agnes rushes over to act as though he's mistaken her house for his, and not for the first time.
'God bless your lost soul,' she says, shooing him away.
The plot of 'Sorry, Baby' centers around a traumatic experience for Agnes that unfolds in a chapter titled 'The Year With the Bad Thing.' But it would be wrong to define 'Sorry, Baby' — or its singular protagonist — by that 'bad thing.' In this remarkably fully formed debut, the moments that matter are the funny and tender ones that persist amid crueler experiences.
Before her script to 'Sorry, Baby' attracted Barry Jenkins as a producer, Victor did improv and made comic social media videos. And the degree to which she's effectively channeled her sly sense of humor and full-bodied resistance to cliche makes 'Sorry, Baby' the immediately apparent revelation of a disarmingly offbeat new voice.
The film unfolds in five chapters from across five years of Agnes' life, told out of chronology. That, in itself, is a way to place the 'bad thing' of 'Sorry, Baby' in a reshuffled context. Stasis, healing and friendship are more the guiding framework of Victor's film.
The opening tenor of 'Sorry, Baby' is, in a way, the prevailing one. Agnes and Lydie (a terrific Ackie) are best pals whose jokey chemistry is as natural as their protectiveness of each other. At a dinner with their former literature grad students, Lydie clasps Agnes' hand under the table at the mention of their former thesis adviser.
In the second chapter, the 'bad thing' one, we find out why. In an unnamed New England liberal arts school, their professor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi), is charming and perceptive. He recognizes Agnes' intelligence and seems to respect her — which makes his betrayal all the more shattering. When the location of one of their meetings shifts last-minute to his home, Victor's camera waits outside while day turns to night. Only when Agnes exits, ashen and horrified, do we pick back up with her as she gets in the car and drives.
In the aftermath, the trauma of the rape spills out of Agnes in unpredictable ways and at unexpected moments. With Lydie. Visiting a doctor. At jury duty. With a stray cat. These encounters — some heartwarming, some insensitive — are both Agnes' way of awkwardly processing what she went through and the movie's way of accentuating how people around you, friend or stranger, have a choice of empathy. Most movingly, in the chapter 'The Year With the Good Sandwich,' John Carroll Lynch plays a man who finds her having a panic attack, and sweetly sits down with her in a parking lot.
Agnes doesn't process her experience the way a movie character might be expected to — with, say, revenge or sudden catharsis. Hers is a sporadic, often absurd healing that includes turning up at her neighbor's house to borrow some lighter fluid. Lydie is key. This is in many ways a portrait of a friendship, and a particularly lived-in one at that. What it's not so much is a story about sexual assault. Just as Agnes is sarcastically and self-deprecatingly resistant to convention, Victor's film sidesteps the definitions that usually accompany such a story. Originality becomes a kind of survival.
'Sorry, Baby,' an A24 release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for sexual content and language. Running time: 104 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
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I felt very inspired by it, and I felt that it was both upsettingly cold and dreary and lonely, and also at the same time very romantic. I loved that. It's a very personal story, but I found a lot of joy in creating parts of it. Maine was a huge part of the creation of the story. I grew up in San Francisco and there's no seasons. Seasons tell time in a way that feels so weird, and you feel time differently, and winter is so weird in terms of loneliness. When we finally decided to shoot near Boston, it was about finding locations that felt sort of analogous to the places I had imagined them taking place in Maine. EV: The whole shoot was supposed to have snow, and we scheduled it at that exact time to try to capture snow, and it snowed the weekend before, and then the last shot of the film, there was a little snow coming down. We couldn't even use that because it didn't match. Then I found out that happened to Certain Women, Kelly Reichardt's movie, and I was like, okay, so it's a good thing. Eva: Always non-linear. It was always starting with the friendship weekend away, the joy of that. You have to fall in love with them in order to later care. In the edit, we experimented with many versions of how that beginning moved. And our final realization is that if you don't have this moment where Naomi does this thing where she's like, you're fucking your neighbor, Gavin, waving her arms around, the film doesn't work. I want to start the film with the joy and the love, because then there's something you lose. And I also wanted to give Agnes this fighting chance of being a whole person. As a society, we often flatten people who've been through that sort of trauma. Naomi Ackie: It's what I love about filmmaking. Every film feels like a student film. Every single one. Lucas Hedges: Even Mickey 17? Naomi: To an extent, yeah. You're always conscious of time, and you're always running around. It's like a house. No matter how big it is, you'll always feel it. Eva: No matter the budget, time is time. Lucas: Every human is mortal and every film is mortal. There's no amount of money you can do to make something immortal. Eva: And sometimes time is a constraint that's beautiful. Naomi: It's like when you watch a toddler and they start making their first words. You're actually watching someone build the language for the first time. That's really, really cool. And usually that language evolves over time. With Eva, with Zoë, the film you make is who you are. And then if you're a part of that first creation of that first language, then you have the privilege of getting to watch how that evolves over time. When I'm going to watch Eva's next movie, I can see how they stretched. Naomi: Yeah, I did actually. It was even in feedback that we got about their friendship, this reminds me of me and my best friend. It also made my job very easy, to enact that idea of a really strong bond and a friendship. Friendships are romantic. They're the loves of your life. And you get to choose it. Eva: When I was looking for this partner on the film, I would always say, Agnes is the moon and Lydie is the sun. Naomi: And I'm a Leo, so that makes sense. Eva: Then I met Naomi, and she was so awesome. And then we read together. I fell in love with her, honestly, and it really elevated the film. The film doesn't work if this friendship doesn't work. And it was this huge exhale from everyone, we found this person who makes the film. I feel like God touched me in sending me Naomi. Naomi: Oh, don't you dare! That's very nice. Eva: It was just right. That she wanted to do the movie is crazy. I'm still not over that she wanted to do it. Lucas: The letter mattered more after I read the script, because the letter takes on the context of the script. I read the letter, and then I read the script, and then I was like, Oh, I can't wait to read the letter again, because now I know who this person is. I got to read something and fall in love with the story, and then immediately connect with it as Lucas. It was a cherry on the top. Immediately I wrote my response, but it was 11 p.m. so I couldn't send it until I got up. I got up early the next day to reach out to my manager. And I sleep in, so... I woke the fuck up. Lucas: I pictured him being an opera singer. The film is operatic almost, in terms of the emotions. Even the sets, it feels like somebody could just start singing. He also felt big, in a way that was full and yet also inherently silly. And there's something about an opera singer that's inherently kind of laughable. What they do is so earnest. They're stuck in a gesture so large that you can't help feeling bad for them. Eva: The experience Agnes is having is the classic thing of being left behind. Lydie shows up with their partner, who is a funhouse mirror, evolved version of Agnes. Agnes has been the baby, and Agnes is like, I'm not the baby anymore. And so the baby takes on this pain of, I'm not gonna get all the love anymore, which is inherently selfish. In moments after trauma, the way to survive is to just think about yourself, which is selfish to people around you, but it's also necessary for survival. Though Lydie has done all this generous loving and care, the end of the film is the first time Agnes is able to see outside herself and see Lydie's need, which is wanting to go on a walk with her partner. Agnes watching the baby for 20 minutes is obviously a super small thing that doesn't balance anything out, but is a moment of, this isn't about me. And I think for Agnes, that's huge. And then Agnes seeing the baby, that's the moment when Agnes is like, I'm going to be able to give you what Lydie gave to me. It's really small, and it's not at all balanced. But I think that is the small change of going from FOMO to, I am of use, just not how I used to be.
