The older I get and especially the more stories I am confronted with, both in art and in life, the more clear it becomes that the notion of ‘overcoming trauma’ is a fiction. Certainly severe traumas, those associated with a singular event, cannot simply be moved on from -it is not how our minds work. They can be repressed, and often have been in the lives of our older generations, but that is not a healthy way to process them. At a point it is just something that has to be lived with, and that may be the hardest truth to realize.
I have not seen a movie that has articulated the particular awkwardness of trying to live a normal life with one’s trauma like Sorry, Baby, perhaps this year’s great indie darling and the directorial debut of Eva Victor, also the film’s writer and star. And I do mean awkwardness, a sense of unease that does encompass sorrow, depression, and frustration, but also humour, horniness, other feelings that distract or provide some relief from the pain. At one point, Victor’s character Agnes confides to a stranger that she doesn’t like talking about her trauma less because it discomforts her, but more because of the feelings of fear or pity it stokes in whomever she is talking to. What she doesn’t say out loud but is clear by implication is that this also applies to herself.
Agnes is a professor in a small New England university town where about five years previously she was an English grad student. She has been living an isolated and isolating life there out of the very house that was once her residence, silently aching for the companionship of her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who sometimes visits from New York City, and occasionally engaging in sexual trysts with a nice neighbour Gavin (Lucas Hedges). A melancholy air hangs over even her light and charming interactions with Lydie and we soon learn it stems from the sexual assault she experienced at the hands of her professor while a student and the complex nature of her trauma about it.
The film begins in the present, "the Year of the Baby" before circling back and running chronologically through each year from "the Bad Thing" on -usually condensed to a singular episode that has stuck with Agnes, such as a recusal from jury duty and the kindness of a random stranger in the midst of a panic attack. Moments that contextualize her tragedy with the strain of processing it in her everyday life. Victor quite smartly encompasses the whole movie in Agnes’s attitude, the tenor of these chapters and the manner in which they are highlighted plucked squarely from the brain of this character who doesn’t perceive her trauma in a way that is in any sense conventional. There is no outburst of anguish from her in the immediate aftermath, rather a kind of numbing confusion. She sits in the bathtub and in a nearly unbroken take recounts the incident in sharp detail to Lydie in a kind of stupefied state. She can barely comprehend it. On top of it being a personal horror, it is also an awkward thing to communicate, and we see Agnes struggle with that through the days and years following, sometimes couching the thing and her feelings in impulsivity and dark humour -but she is not by any means emotionally detached from the event. It runs counter to how we often see these themes play out in art, and there is nothing wrong with those more open approaches -there is a necessity even for them. But to see this very distinct illustration of trauma, utterly honest and touching and heartbreaking in some respects, is just as important and meaningful.
Victor, a relatively unknown non-binary actor and comedian, might have cast someone more established as carrier of this weight -but it would have been a mistake. Not only because the movie's story and themes read as distinctly personal, but because they understand emphatically the tonal balance that needs to be struck and can play it with the utmost conviction. This character is largely antisocial and emotionally guarded, yet Victor reveals more personality and idiosyncrasy in these rather than less. Their nuances are so singular and yet intricately universally recognizable that by the end you can fully comprehend what is being said between the lines. Like in a late film serious conversation with Gavin that Agnes is cagey about, or the unspoken tension between Agnes and Lydie's wife Fran (E.R. Fightmaster).
Lydie is the most important person in Agnes's life, and Agnes bears a touch of resentment towards her world apart from her in New York and some jealousy towards Fran as Lydie’s primary relationship. By the time we meet Fran and the couple’s child together, it makes sense. Ackie delivers a performance of gorgeously platonic warmth and devotion, a sweet and often wonderfully funny counterpart to Agnes, who brings out the best in her. Agnes is not the same person with anyone else, the chemistry she shares with Lydie is so beautiful and wholesome. This is a woman who seriously offers to burn down the office of her abuser for her, who joins her in verbal retaliation against a somewhat apathetic doctor. And in choosing to start the movie with a visit from Lydie, Victor does an excellent job in illuminating a real void in her absence, that the audience feels as sharply as Agnes. She is lost without her friend.
The grief in missing her is another major theme of the film and of course is tied in to Agnes’s own weirdness in her inability to leave this town, staying at the school, and even moving into her abuser’s former office when she attains his job. While the psychological severity of these is alluded to, Victor keeps the movie palatable with their lightness of tone. They are tasteful without ever undercutting anything -the assault itself is a prime example, illustrated only via Agnes arriving at the house in a long shot transitioning to night as she leaves in shock hours later. Frequently, tension is broken up by a delightful humour in the personalities of Agnes and the people around her, and Victor cast the film very strongly for this effect. It’s wonderful to see Hedges back after a few years’ hiatus from movies as a compatibly quirky and endearing love interest, sarcastically covering for the purpose of his visit while Lydie is around; and John Carroll Lynch embodies a wonderfully working class earnestness as a store manager who befriends Agnes in a moment of crisis. These interactions and the tenor of the movie itself often strike a note of warm if somewhat dark humour that relates aptly Victor’s distinct voice.
While Sorry, Baby is very much about the trauma of a sexual assault, it succeeds at not dwelling on the assault. The professor is gone from the movie fairly quickly and Agnes does not ultimately pursue charges for her own reasons. This is a movie that centres the person and not the violation that threatens to define her. There is a kind of reckoning eventually, while acknowledging that wounds don’t fully heal but providing a tender catharsis for both Agnes and the subject of her climactic monologue. It is simple and a little bit broadly-oriented, but it is the most emotionally honest beat of the movie -almost of any movie that has touched on such topics. And it leaves you in a kind of wonder. Victor is a good director, though arguably a better writer and actor; each of their skills meshing together to produce this quietly heartfelt, uniquely articulated, beautiful film -one of the best directorial debuts of the decade.
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