Naomi Ackie and Eva Victor
Noni Ford discusses the authenticity and friendship imbued in Eva Victor’s acclaimed feature debut. Please note this article contains references to the central story of the film, which involves sexual assault and its ramifications.
“It’s a lot to be wherever.” — Agnes from Sorry, Baby
Memories can be so strong that at times it can feel like there’s a mini movie theater in your mind replaying slivers of your past where you are both the viewer in the audience and the projectionist rolling the film at a moment’s notice. And yet memory can feel slippery sometimes, and it can be hard to define and to collect the tendrils of that night so long ago. Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby is not interested in laying out the before and after of Agnes’s life in exact chronology of ‘that night’ in question. It’s also not interested in voyeuristically displaying the sexual assault at the center of the plot; we don’t need to see it to feel its impact. Our guts twist all the same as we watch her graduate advisor’s house with the lights on and the curtains drawn as the light seeps out of the sky.
People don’t really get shocked the way they used to because it can feel like we’ve seen everything possible on screen. It sometimes feels like in a bid to knock people from complacency and draw crowds, filmmakers are in a competition to find what they can show next to reclaim that old shock value again. It makes this film bolder for not indulging in that race, and for instead showing us these moments and conversations in Agnes’s existence that carry the subtlety and the horror of moving through life after someone has profoundly hurt you. Female rage here isn’t rearing its head by taking the wheel with us cheering it on from the sidelines, it is simmering and present with little outlet. And that feels honest — that’s the part that touches you, the viewer, the most.
Everything about this movie feels real. The snow swirling in cold air on your window pane, noticing the beauty of your surroundings while you yourself are trying to get out of your head. The academic buildings with their stately exteriors and incongruous interiors that feel like a corporate office, but are made somehow shinier, more elegant due to the wrappings of academia. Sitting down to a meal vaguely around the holidays, talking to people that teeter between acquaintance and friend while you try to find a conversational thread to pull and stick to for the balance of the evening. This doesn’t feel like a stageplay where the people are parts moving across the sets. No one is impossibly glamorous with spotless makeup, $100 shoes, or in pristine rooms. This feels like genuine people making sense of their lives, their decisions, their pasts, and their presents with no frills.
Eva Victor’s Agnes
Lydie (Naomi Ackie), Agnes’s best friend from graduate school, bookends the film as she comes in to both affirm the bond of their friendship and as a measure for the development of time. Even as Agnes succeeds and advances in her professional career as a professor, there’s a sense of stasis in her life that is absent from Lydie’s. Lydie finds love, gets married, starts a family, all while Agnes stays in her house, the same one she has been in for a while, and teaches at a school where she was not able to seek out justice for what happened. Although unspoken, there’s an anxiety in each of Lydie’s visits as Agnes notices the gulf that has been forming for quite a while between who they were in grad school and who they are now.
We feel it in every question Agnes asks and in the way she savors the moments spent with her friend back in her physical orbit. Equally we see Lydie’s care and her softness as she assuages her friend’s worries as soon as she sees them balloon before her eyes. Ackie portrays her character with so many layers, there’s hardly a scene between her and Victor’s Agnes where you don’t see some of Lydie’s internal struggle. As much as she loves her friend, she doesn’t always have all of the answers or know what to say. We see her hesitation as she tries to find the right words or phrases to convey her solidarity even while knowing that Agnes is going through something they do not share. The beauty of these scenes is that it is easy to see yourself on both sides of the friendship, experiencing the intricacies of sharing so much of your life with someone and looking for middle ground when your similarities or shared history is shrinking down faster and faster.
Agnes and her professor
There’s a smallness to this film, both in terms of the run time of its scenes, its settings, and its minimal music that always feels like it’s right underneath the sound mix. This smallness helps each scene feel big because you have only so much to focus on and to see. There are no distractions, every scene gets to the heart of things and to the feelings at that moment in time. It makes the writing stand out and it makes the characters feel closer, a closeness that draws you in and makes you feel like you’re also on the sofa, in the office chair, or in the passenger seat of the car.
Doorways both grand and plain are frequently the center of frame that we’re always on the precipice of, particularly the main doorway to Anges’s house. We hear it shutting and opening quietly in earlier parts of the story and then see it more frequently as time passes. It feels like at times it functions as a barrier to keep people out and to establish a firmer boundary for her zone of safety. And then it begins to morph into more of an enforced blockade encasing Agnes inside this house, the only place it seems that she has truly felt cared for and safe since the attack happened. Just like everything else, though, it doesn’t last forever; time passes and she lets more people in, getting better at talking and connecting with them. She even gets better about talking about it or at least acknowledging that it happened. That it is part of her and that she is still working through it. Thinking about it and then not thinking about it because that is how memories linger.
Eva Victor and John Carroll Lynch
Films like this one don’t have an ending because there’s nothing to wrap up — from the first to the last frame, Agnes is learning, growing, teaching, in pain, healing, and living. Her story is not over and neither is the processing of her memories. Maybe she won’t change too drastically, but change will continue to happen around her and she will experience it. Too many stories of women who persevere or rise above their circumstances are predisposed to having the heroic lead project her strength through an uncharacteristic action. Or vengeance that has to be reaped in a particularly bloody way, and it feels good to see that on screen, to gain a sense of triumph over the system the character has dismantled through her efforts.
However, you don’t usually see strength shown in the little actions like deciding to get up in the morning, choosing to keep loving the books you love even if there’s a taint to them now, and knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are going to keep getting up everyday for yourself. Agnes gives us this blueprint, doesn’t insist that it’s the way to recovery, instead just delivers it as a possibility in the aftermath of trauma. A reality we can take in if something happens to us and we don’t have a direction to go next. So I like that the end doesn’t put a bow on her life’s story or insist on telling us that she’s fully pushed through what happened to her in that room where she went to get notes on her thesis. It just ends when it’s time for us to walk away and leave her to it.
As awards season comes upon us and ballots begin to be filled in short order, I hope there’s a spot for Sorry, Baby. It’s a filmmaking debut that’s heartfelt, vulnerable, and needs to be seen.
Sorry, Baby will be screened at IU Cinema on September 12 and September 13 as part of the New Americas Cinema series.