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.
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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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Winnipeg Free Press
2 days ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
How ‘Sorry, Baby' writer-producer-star Eva Victor made the year's most exciting debut
The Oscar-winning producer of 'Moonlight' really wanted to get in touch with Eva Victor. Adele Romanski and her producing partner Mark Ceryak were 'kind of obsessed' with the short, comedic videos Victor was putting out on various social media platforms. Titles of some that still exist online include 'when I definitely did not murder my husband' and a series called 'Eva vs. Anxiety.' Romanski and Ceryak started bugging their Pastel productions partner Barry Jenkins, certainly the most well-known name of the bunch, to make the first move and send Victor a direct message. But they had to ask themselves a big question first: Would that be weird? 'We had to negotiate whether or not that was appropriate for Barry, a married man, to send Eva a DM,' Romanski said. 'We were like 'yessss, do it!'' What started as a curiosity about a distinct voice, someone whose observations about the world and society were hilarious, sharp and undeniable, just a few years later would become one of the most exciting debuts in recent memory. 'Sorry, Baby,' which Victor wrote, directed and stars in, is a gentle film about trauma. It's also funny and strange and fresh, a wholly original statement from an artist with a vision. And there's a cat too. The film opens Friday in New York and Los Angeles and expands nationwide in the coming weeks. A boost from Barry Jenkins It's a wild turn of events for Victor, who goes by they/she pronouns and who never dared to dream that they could possibly direct. Victor grew up in San Francisco in a family that cherished and pursued artistic endeavors, even if it wasn't their primary careers. At Northwestern University, Victor focused on playwriting — it was something they could have control over while also pursuing acting. After college it was improv, writing for the satirical website Reductress ('Woman Seduced by Bangs Despite Knowing They're Bad for Her,' 'How to Cut Out All the People who are Not Obsessed with Your Dog'), some acting gigs, like a recurring role on the Showtime series 'Billions,' and social media, where their tweets and videos often went viral. But there was an itch to work on something longer form, something beyond that immediate gratification of virality. Jenkins' message came at the right time. Then at Victor's first meeting at Pastel productions, he planted a seed of an idea: Maybe Victor was already a director. 'He said something that very profoundly impacted me: That the comedy videos I was doing were me directing without me realizing it,' Victor said. 'It was just a different scale. That kind of stuck with me.' 'Sorry, Baby' was born out of a personal story that Victor had wanted to write about for a while. After the general meeting, they had a renewed sense of purpose and went away one snowy winter to a cabin in Maine to write, with their cat, movies and books as companions. The screenplay, in which a New England graduate student named Agnes is assaulted by her thesis adviser, poured out of them. 'I wanted to make a film that was about feeling stuck when everyone around you keeps moving that didn't center any violence. The goal was to have the film and its structure support the time afterwards, not the actual experience,' Victor said. 'I really think the thing it's about is trying to heal and the slow pace at which healing comes and how it's really not linear and how there are joys to be found in the everyday and especially in very affirming friendships and sometimes, like, a sandwich depending on the day.' Somewhere along the way Victor started to also believe that they were the best person for the job. They were the only person standing in their way. 'The less focus there was on me as the creator of it, and the more focus there was on how to tell the story as effectively as possible, the more comfortable I became,' Victor said. 'I understood exactly what I wanted it to look and feel like.' Learning to direct But there was a lot to learn. Before the shoot, Victor also asked Jane Schoenbrun, who they'd met once for pie, if they could come to the 'I Saw the TV Glow' set to just watch. Schoenbrun said yes. 'It was a completely wonderful, transforming experience of friendship and learning,' Victor said. 'Jane is so confident about what they want in their films and it was a real honor to watch them so many decisions and stay so calm.' Empowered by what they'd seen, Victor assembled a 'dream team' of experts, like cinematographer Mia Cioffi Henry who also teaches at NYU and an editor, Alex O'Flinn, who teaches at UCLA. Victor rounded out the cast with Lucas Hedges, as a kind neighbor, 'Billions' alum Louis Cancelmi, as the thesis adviser, and Naomi Ackie as her best friend Lydie – the first person she talks to after the incident, the one who accompanies her to the hospital, and the one whose life doesn't stop. 'We built the schedule in a way that allowed us to have all our friendship fun scenes at first,' Victor said. 'We kind of got to go through the experience of building a friendship in real time.' Ackie immediately connected to the script and thought whoever wrote it, 'must be the coolest.' The reality of Victor, she said, did not disappoint. 'They don't realize how magnetic their openness is,' Ackie said. 'There's something extremely honest about them and curious and playful.' A Sundance sensation Romanski and everyone at Pastel productions knew they had something special, a gem even. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. 'They're chasing something tonally that I've never seen anybody go after before,' Romanski said. 'It's the blend of both a very, very specific, personal comedic tone and also a true sense of artistry.' But nothing's ever guaranteed until you put it in front of a public audience, which they did earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival where it quickly became a breakout sensation, with standing ovations and the screenwriting award, whose past winners include Lisa Cholodenko, Kenneth Lonergan, Christopher Nolan and Debra Granik. 'You just don't know. Then on the other side, you know,' Romanski said. 'We felt it with 'Aftersun.' We felt it with 'Moonlight.' And we definitely felt it with 'Sorry, Baby.'' And like 'Aftersun' and 'Moonlight' before it, 'Sorry, Baby' also found a home with A24, which promised a theatrical release. Among the giants of the summer movie calendar, in which everything is big, bigger, biggest, 'Sorry, Baby' is the delicate discovery. 'I wanted it to exist in this space between reality and escape. I wanted it to be this immersive thing,' Victor said. 'It's a sensitive film. I hope it finds people when they need it. That's my biggest wish.'
Winnipeg Free Press
3 days ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
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. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. 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.
Winnipeg Free Press
3 days ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Arson ignites the Dennis Lehane-created Apple TV+ firebug series ‘Smoke'
NEW YORK (AP) — Author and screenwriter Dennis Lehane has a healthy respect for the power of fire. He learned that the hard way — surviving a house fire in Boston in his 30s. Lehane was living on the top floor of an apartment building when a propane tank on the roof exploded and started a blaze. The landlord was replacing the building's smoke detectors at the time so none were working. Lehane is lucky to be alive and he credits, in part, the flames. 'If you're trapped in fire — if you wake up and the building you're in is on fire — it's up to the fire at that point. It's really up to whims of the fire, whatever's going to happen to you. And I find that lack of control fascinating.' Lehane, whose literary canon includes the novels-turned-movie hits 'Gone, Baby, Gone' and 'Mystic River,' has turned to fire for his latest project — Apple TV+'s new nine-episode crime drama 'Smoke.' It debuts Friday. The story of 'Smoke' It's based on the true story of a former arson investigator who was convicted in 1998 of serial arson, captured in part after he wrote a novel about a firefighter who was a serial arsonist. The case — chronicled in the 2021 podcast Firebug — sparked something in Lehane. 'I just thought, that's just the height of craziness. Like, you're not only in denial about who you are, you're so far in denial you're going to write a book about what a great guy you are and then use the fires that you set as the models for the fires in your book?' he says. 'I can get in the zip code of that mindset; I cannot land on the street, though.' The show marks a reunion between Lehane, Greg Kinnear and Taron Egerton, who previously worked together on the 2022 Apple TV+ series 'Black Bird.' It also stars Jurnee Smollett, Anna Chlumsky and John Leguizamo, and boasts an original, eerie song by Radiohead's Thom Yorke called 'Dialing In.' Egerton plays Dave Gudsen, an arson investigator in Umberland, a fictional town in the Pacific Northwest, who is chasing two separate firebugs. He's teamed up with a smart but troubled detective played by Smollett, who begin a game of cat and mouse. If the setup sounds like it leads to a typical TV procedural, viewers who stick around get rewarded by a show that gets weirder and more complex, infused by Lehane's attraction to moral ambiguity. 'We walk with contradictions and I think that's the dramatic irony that Dennis is exploring.' says Smollett. 'These people are saying they're fighting to do the right thing and yet they're morally questionable. I think that's very relevant today.' Goofy and frightening Edgerton's Dave, it's soon clear, is not who he appears to be and has an almost superhuman ability to compartmentalize aspects of his personal and private lives. He is both bombastic and insecure, goofy and frightening. 'Taron has endless reservoirs of talent to draw on. He's an extremely inspired actor,' says Lehane. 'He comes at it from the same place I come at it, which is Taron won't take a role unless some part of it scares him. I won't tell a story unless some of it scares me.' Egerton said he relished a chance to show a different side of himself, rebelling a little at his safe, good-guy public persona after the success of his heroic turn in 2024's 'Carry-On.' 'You know what? I'm not that affable. I am sometimes, but I'm not some of the time,' he says, laughing. 'I think the thing I love about Dave is there is a tension between what the perception of him is and who he really is. And how can you ever really know who a person is?' Adding to the series' allure is some of Lehane's street poetry, like the line: 'Whatever you do, whatever you know, however much lifetime wisdom you've accrued, fire puts a lie to it all.' Playing with fire Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. Smollett was onboard after an initial conversation with Lehane in which he said: 'So many of us say we want to be happy and yet we are drawn to the very thing that will destroy us.' That was Smollett's entry point to her gloriously messy character. Smollett's detective, a former Marine, refuses to be vulnerable, is excellent at her job, traumatized by a past experience with arson and not afraid to mess with anyone. Early on, she is shown using a sledgehammer to her own home. 'She plays with fire,' says Smollett. 'She's living on the edge and has this mask and this guard up and walks around as if she's invincible because she's really just afraid.' Lehane says with 'Smoke' he's drawn to people who invest in a narrative of who they choose to be rather than be true to who they really are. 'You don't know who they are because they don't know who they are,' he says. 'They're running from themselves, they're running from their true selves. And I felt like that's the interesting story here I'm trying to tell.'
