The “bad thing” that happens in Sorry, Baby takes place behind closed doors and closed curtains. We stand outside a house and watch as Agnes (Eva Victor) enters. She’s visiting her literature professor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi), to talk over her thesis. We stay outside. Day slips into night. Lights turn on and off. Pedestrians wander by.
Then, Agnes re-emerges. She sits on the steps outside and puts her boots back on. She walks fast, but doesn’t run. She pulls at her jacket, gets in her car, and drives home. We’re given plenty of time to study her expression. Her eyes are glazed over – a clear sign of disassociation. Something’s trembling in there, too – a wave of aftershocks powerful enough to cause a bridge collapse. It’s a remarkable way to depict sexual assault and its aftermath, the life beyond the trauma that Victor – as star, writer, and director – furnishes with every light on the spectrum.
Agnes’s world can be sweet and tender, because she has a best friend named Lydie (Naomi Ackie) who would burn the world for her, and who Ackie lends her kilowatt smile. Her friends-with-benefits neighbour (Lucas Hedges) is the sexual equivalent of grilled cheese, satisfying and uncomplicated. The mystical, so-called “cat distribution system” lands her with a stray kitten at just the right moment.
But still, she’s somebody a bad thing happened to, and now she can’t look at the boots she wore that night or hear the word “extraordinary” in the same way ever again (it’s what he wrote on her thesis paper). A doctor is too casual in his use of the word “rape”. College administrators let her know they can’t take action due to a technicality, but still coo the pointless phrase, “We know what you’re going through. We are women.”
Sorry, Baby is funny in that confrontational way where your body moves to laugh, but you feel a little guilty for letting it out. That’s life, though. Mining misfortune for a punchline is its own survival skill. And Victor doesn’t chase after subjectivity. We’re kept at a distance, not only during the assault itself, but throughout the film. Sometimes we’re left to linger in the doorway of an office. At other times we’re stuffed in the corner of an ordinary room in a way that makes them seem cavernous, and Agnes very small within them.
The director knows their audience will either relate to Agnes or they won’t. So it’s more honest to present Agnes’s life without embellishment, to rely instead on a finely tuned performance that wordlessly clues us in on when the character’s mind has shifted from the present back into the half-remembered past. Agnes’s body will flinch or freeze, in a way that makes sense out of a passing comment, “I remember moments of it and I feel in my body that it was really bad.”
She’s trapped between the desire to throw it all out, every memory of it, and her inability to physically separate herself from the assault. She works at the same college where it happened, in her professor’s old job, working in his old office. The film opens with Lydie’s visit from New York City, so that she can gently announce to Agnes that she’s pregnant.
Agnes doesn’t really know what to do about this baby. What could she even say to a life that innocent, after all she’s experienced? What she eventually decides upon feels perfect in the moment, a beautiful coda to all that we’ve just seen. This might be a film about the stubbornness of pain – and yet, it holds a boundless capacity to heal.
Dir: Eva Victor. Starring: Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Louis Cancelmi, Kelly McCormack, Hettienne Park, E. R. Fightmaster, Lucas Hedges, John Carroll Lynch. Cert 15, 104 minutes.
‘Sorry, Baby’ is released on 22 August
