“Write what you know” only gets you so far. An awful lot of debut films, even from writer-directors with talent, start from a personal place only to end up at a weirdly impersonal “universal” one you don’t fully believe, or trust.
“Sorry, Baby” is so, so much better than that. Eva Victor’s first feature as writer-director, and star, feels like a lived experience, examined, cross-examined, ruminated over, carefully shaped and considered.
Its tone is unexpected, predominantly but not cynically comic. The movie doesn’t settle for “write what you know.” Victor followed a tougher, more challenging internal directive: Write what you need to find out about what you know.
The story deals with a college sexual assault, without being “about” that, or only about that. “Sorry, Baby” concerns how Agnes, the sharp-witted protagonist played by Victor, makes sense of her present tense, several years after she was mentored, then raped, by her favorite professor, with the bad thing now in the past but hardly out of sight, or mind.
Victor arranges the telling non-chronologically, which keeps this liquid notion of past and present flowing as a complicated emotional state. When “Sorry, Baby” begins, Agnes is thriving as an English literature professor at the same tiny New England college she attended as a graduate student. She now lives near campus with her cat in a somewhat remote old house, crammed with books. Lydie, Agnes’s good friend from grad school played by the superb Naomi Ackie, has come for a visit, and the magical rightness of the interplay between Victor and Ackie gives the film a warm, energizing hum.
At one point, Lydie asks her if she leaves the house much. Agnes responds verbally, but her body language, her evasive eyes and other “tells” have their own say. Lydie’s question lingers in the air, just before we’re taken back to Agnes and Lydie’s grad school years for the film’s next chapter.
Here we see Agnes on the cusp of her future, surrounded by ideas and novels and opinions, as well as an envious fellow student (Kelly McCormack, a touch broad as written and played in the film’s one tonal misjudgment). Agnes’ writing has attracted the attention of the campus conversation topic Decker (Louis Cancelmi), a faculty member with a faulty marriage and a barely-read but undeniably published novel Agnes admires. The admiration is mutual, even if the power dynamic is not.
At the last minute, the teacher reschedules his meeting with Agnes to take place at his house near campus. We see Agnes arrive, be greeted at the door and go inside. The camera stays outside, down the steps and by the sidewalk, for an unusually long time. Finally she tumbles, more or less, back out on the porch; it’s getting dark by this time; Decker appears in the doorway, trying to apologize, sort of? Kind of? And the scene is over.
Only later do we learn some unnerving particulars of what happened to Agnes, once she is ready, finally, to talk about it with Lydie. “Sorry, Baby,” as Victor said in one post-screening discussion, began with the notion of how to film the assault — meaning, what not to show. “In real life,” the filmmaker said, “we don’t get to be behind the door. We hear what happened and we believe people. (And) we don’t need to be inside to know.”
From there, “Sorry, Baby” continues its flow back and forth, in the years in between what happened and where Agnes is now. There’s an eccentric neighbor (Lucas Hedges, unerring) who initially appears to be call-the-police material, but it doesn’t work out that way at all. Lifelines can come from anywhere, Agnes learns, and expressing oneself honestly and directly is easier said than done.
Throughout this precisely written film, we see and hear Agnes caught in weird language-built labyrinths as she squares off with the college’s HR department while attempting to file a report against the professor, or — much later — Agnes at jury duty selection for an unrelated matter, explaining the incident in her past to her questioner in weirdly funny ways. Victor’s a tightrope-walker in these scenes; “Sorry, Baby” is as much about everyone around Agnes, performing their understanding, or concern, regarding the Bad Thing in her past.
Some of the more overt bits of bleak comedy are better finessed than others, and you wouldn’t mind another five or 10 minutes of hangout time, complementing the well-paced overall structure. But even that’s a sign of success. How many standout movies have you seen this year that made you think, you know, that actually could’ve been a little longer? Clear-eyed, disarming and, yes, plainly semi-autobiographical, “Sorry, Baby” takes every right turn in making Agnes far more than a tragic yet wisecracking victim, with a smiling-through-tears ending waiting around the bend. She’s just living her full, up-and-down-and-up life, acknowledging the weight of that life without solving or dissolving the bad thing.
This is Victor’s achievement, too, of course. Already, this quietly spectacular first-time filmmaker’s promise has been fulfilled.
