Eva Victor does it all in tragicomic character study Sorry, Baby
The surprisingly funny debut from the writer-director-star observes the before, during, and after of a sexual assault.
Photo: A24
Sorry, Baby and its central figure, literature student-turned-professor Agnes (played by writer-director Eva Victor), form the lever that pivots around the film’s invisible fulcrum, an unseen sexual assault. Broken up into five nonlinear chapters and multiple seasons spent over the course of years in the same New England college town, the memoir-like debut is as delightful as it is momentarily harrowing—that a story about post-traumatic dissociation and recovery is this funny and charming is a minor miracle. Its fragmented literary structure and Victor’s captivating lead turn cohere theme, form, and content, melding the elliptical episodes into a canny representation of memory.
Victor’s script does this by preventing the assault from defining Agnes’ life. It’s still an event heavy enough to influence the orbit of everything that followed it, and to make that which led up to it seem like an inevitable march towards doom, but life goes one. Keeping with general relativity, though, Agnes’ assault alters time and space. Vignettes move faster or slower depending on their proximity to it, and its taint poisons buildings, if not entire towns. This is all done elegantly: Hours leap in a blink, while an unbroken tracking shot captures the kind of absurd little details that calcify into long-term memory. Victor’s tics and flinches signal how innocuous items, articles of clothing, or even specific words, can simply be ruined by someone. But, stuck as Agnes may appear to be, living in the same house and teaching at the same institution at which she finished her studies, she’s not trying to escape. There’s a stubbornness and bravery to her persistence, unspoken but not unappreciated by those around her.