In ‘Sorry, Baby,’ Eva Victor makes a disarming debut

The first thing to love about writer-director-star Eva Victor’s extraordinary debut “Sorry, Baby” is how she, as the young professor Agnes, tries, and fails, to hide a tryst with her neighbour. Agnes lives in a quaint New England home where her best friend and fellow former grad student Lydie (Naomi Ackie) is visiting. We are just getting to know each of these characters when a knock comes on the door. Gavin (Lucas Hedges) stands outside confused when Lydie answers. Agnes rushes over to act as though he’s mistaken her house for his, and not for the first time. “God bless your lost soul,” she says, shooing him away.

The plot of “Sorry, Baby” centres around a traumatic experience for Agnes that unfolds in a chapter titled “The Year With the Bad Thing.” But it would be wrong to define “Sorry, Baby” — or its singular protagonist — by that “bad thing.” In this remarkably fully formed debut, the moments that matter are the funny and tender ones that persist amid crueler experiences.

Before her script to “Sorry, Baby” attracted Barry Jenkins as a producer, Victor did improv and made comic social media videos. And the degree to which she’s effectively channeled her sly sense of humour and full-bodied resistance to cliche makes “Sorry, Baby” the immediately apparent revelation of a disarmingly offbeat new voice. The film unfolds in five chapters from across five years of Agnes’ life, told out of chronology. That, in itself, is a way to place the “bad thing” of “Sorry, Baby” in a reshuffled context. Stasis, healing and friendship are more the guiding framework of Victor’s film.

The opening tenor of “Sorry, Baby” is, in a way, the prevailing one. Agnes and Lydie (a terrific Ackie) are best pals whose jokey chemistry is as natural as their protectiveness of each other. At a dinner with their former literature grad students, Lydie clasps Agnes’ hand under the table at the mention of their former thesis adviser.

In the second chapter, the “bad thing” one, we find out why. In an unnamed New England liberal arts school, their professor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi), is charming and perceptive. He recognizes Agnes’ intelligence and seems to respect her — which makes his betrayal all the more shattering. When the location of one of their meetings shifts last-minute to his home, Victor’s camera waits outside while day turns to night. Only when Agnes exits, ashen and horrified, do we pick back up with her as she gets in the car and drives.

In the aftermath, the trauma of the rape spills out of Agnes in unpredictable ways and at unexpected moments. With Lydie. Visiting a doctor. At jury duty. With a stray cat. These encounters — some heartwarming, some insensitive — are both Agnes’ way of awkwardly processing what she went through and the movie’s way of accentuating how people around you, friend or stranger, have a choice of empathy. Most movingly, in the chapter “The Year With the Good Sandwich,” John Carroll Lynch plays a man who finds her having a panic attack, and sweetly sits down with her in a parking lot.

Agnes doesn’t process her experience the way a movie character might be expected to — with, say, revenge or sudden catharsis. Hers is a sporadic, often absurd healing that includes turning up at her neighbor’s house to borrow some lighter fluid. Lydie is key. This is in many ways a portrait of a friendship, and a particularly lived-in one at that. What it’s not so much is a story about sexual assault. Just as Agnes is sarcastically and self-deprecatingly resistant to convention, Victor’s film sidesteps the definitions that usually accompany such a story. Originality becomes a kind of survival.

Associated Press