Sorry Baby

There is such a thing as a Festival Discovery. When you walk into a theatre blind and watch in awe a film taking shape and culminating into everything you wanted to see but did not know. There is such a thing as a film seeing you in a crowd, acknowledging you for what you are and smoothening the jagged edges of what has become of you. Like offering a handshake in the dark. Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was that film for me. The description on the festival website was vague: “Something bad happened to Agnes. But life goes on… for everyone around her, at least.” It said something and nothing. Something bad happened to Agnes (Victor), the tall, awkward protagonist of the film who lives in a quaint house and is overjoyed every time her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie) visits her from New York. They sit on a couch and collapse into a lived-in comfort of years. You look around and see no one else around. When they meet their other friends from college, Agnes is asked, “Do you still live there?” Her gaze falls and Lydie holds her hand beneath the table. But even she has her own apprehensions. “Don’t kill yourself,” she urges. “I won’t,” Agnes reassures with a certitude that implies that she had considered it.

My first reading of Agnes (played by Eva Victor) was that of a buoyant 30-something person struggling to hold on to her twenties, shirking responsibility of a long-term relationship (or anything that we consider ‘grown-up’), sleep-walking through a listless mid-career, and probably too afraid to leave the comfort of her surroundings. Living in a small home in New England, she’s visited by her best friend and former house-mate, Lydie (Naomie Ackie), a writer in New York, working on her next book. It appears some time has passed since they last met. As they catch up, Lydie talks about her book, and Agnes deflects any conversation about herself. I braced myself for a film that ends with Agnes acting like a responsible adult, exiting her dream world.

Often, a woman who finds the courage, and the words, to talk about an assault that’s happened to her, is asked why she is doing it ‘so late’. It’s easier to say ‘an’ assault, rather than ‘my’ assault because disassociation kicks in. Owning up to it becomes too much, and the only way to survive is to begin distancing from ‘the event’. All too often, it goes unaddressed, lying like an unhealed wound, pushing itself to the fore when the survivor least expects it. Debutant director Eva Victor’s ‘Sorry, Baby’ in which Victor plays Agnes, a professor in a small New England town, does have a Bad Thing happen to her. Her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who is visiting her when the film opens, was her grad school roommate, when it happened. In the film’s most chilling sequences, we are rendered spectators to the Bad Thing, at a remove. We see the tall, gangling, fresh-faced Agnes go into her thesis guide’s home at dusk: the lights go, hours elapse, and we wait, at a distance, as the camera stays unmoving and unflinching, for Agnes to come stumbling out, sit on the steps, wear her boots, and get into the car and drive back home, possibly the longest, and the most difficult, drive of her life.