At their best, movies can be subtle expressions of feelings we’ve had but can’t fully articulate. Besides, when it comes to feelings, articulation might be overrated: one of the functions of art is to explore the undefinable, and sometimes it’s a relief to let a movie do some of the emotional heavy lifting for us.
That’s the function writer-director-star Eva Victor’s debut film Sorry, Baby strives to fulfill. Victor plays Agnes, an academic in her late 20s who has stuck around in the sleepy college town where she earned her graduate degree. That choice has seemingly paid off: she’s landed a full-time teaching job at her alma mater, following in the footsteps of the charming instructor who’d advised her on her thesis, a guy with a name straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi). Shortly after Agnes starts the job, her closest friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie), an old schoolmate, comes to visit from New York. Lydie has big news of her own: recently married, she has just learned she’s pregnant. Agnes is happy for her, but she also feels abandoned. Lydie is moving on, reshaping her life after grad school in a way Agnes can’t.
There’s a reason for that: it turns out that Agnes was sexually assaulted in her final year of graduate school. Sorry, Baby moves backward and forward in time, recounting the events leading up to the assault as well as its aftermath, during which Agnes struggles with the gray areas of sexual trauma, the jumble of anger, guilt, and recrimination the victim is often left to deal with.
The event isn’t dramatized, but Agnes’ description of it is filled with anguish, not just because it caused her physical and emotional pain, but because she’d liked and trusted the perpetrator—maybe she even thought she might be sexually attracted to him, though in a key moment, she realized she was not. Victor, in both this performance and the shaping of the film, isn’t afraid to explore those mixed feelings. Somehow it’s expected that all rape victims should feel a certain way: there ought to be unmitigated anger, or a thirst for vengeance. Victor treads into subtler territory here. Agnes doesn’t press charges against her rapist, explaining, “I want him to stop being someone who does that. And if he went to jail, he’d just be a person who does that who’s also in jail.” Agnes doesn’t want retribution; she wants the whole thing to have played out differently, to not have been disappointed by a person she trusted.
You could quibble that Agnes’ decision not to press charges endangers other women, but that’s not the point of Sorry, Baby. And when you see how she’s treated, particularly by two faux-feminist campus representatives whose job is ostensibly to help her, her choice is understandable. This is a sort-of comedy about personal trauma, a delicate line to walk—and Victor mostly pulls it off. There’s comic relief when you least expect it: What can you do when your cat brings you an almost-dead mouse? There’s no good solution to this problem, though Agnes does her best. Victor and her fellow performers navigate the movie’s tone shifts admirably. Ackie—terrific in the title role of the 2022 biopic Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody—plays Lydie as the kind of friend who can read your deepest secrets, no matter how hard you try to keep them under wraps; she listens with both her ears and eyes. And if Victor at times makes Agnes’ awkwardness a little too self-consciously adorable, the actor sparkles, quietly, in scenes with the shy neighbor, Gavin (Lucas Hedges), who comes by at preappointed times for friends-with-benefits sex. Victor shows how Agnes stops just short of letting herself want too much from any one human being. There’s no facile way to “get over” or “get past” what happened to her—yet we can see her relearning, step by step, how to move through the world. She has nothing to gain by retreating from it.
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