EVA VICTOR IN SORRY BABY

A dry, humorous approach to trauma that makes it an integral part of a life

It's time to review Eva Victor's Sorry, Baby. Actually it came out in June, but it's on HBO now and is a Metascore 90 and has been on best lists and is an awards possibility, so it should be watched and talked about. It's an indie first film and the comic Eva Victor wrote, directed, and stars in it. She cast her tale of a brilliant woman at a New England university who survives sexual assault into five achronological chapters of years. This structure is not a favorite of mine and saying it's clear, or pretty clear, doesn't justify it, but a logical reason for it might be to keep the moment of the assault from seeming to hang over everything else in the life of Agnes (Victor). Yes, she can't escape it: but she has a life.

Also, this movie finds time to be occasionally quite funny. There are moments of dry humor. The moments of caricature sometimes go awry, as with the jealous rival student Natasha, played by Kelly McCormack,and the clueless doctor (Marc Carver)., who seem overdrawn. But there are surprising moments of pleasure in Victor's dry, crabwise approach to trauma, and moments when familiar scenes - girlfriends hanging out, a courtroom, a boyfriend jumping into the bathtub, a class on Nabokov's Lolita, even a panic attack - have a nice, fresh, hard edge burnished by the filmmaker's improvisational comedy skills.

This crabwise approach achieves its primary goal: there is no excessive, melodramatic lead-up to the Bad Thing that happens to Agnes. It's after that when Agnes in the first chapter is visited by her old roommate and bosom buddy Lydie (the excellent Naomi Ackie), a British-accented person of color. The Thing has happened a couple of years earlier, They joke around vulgarly, lots of F-words. Lydie has good news: she's pregnant, also deep. into being lesbian now and happy in a relationship. It's all fun, except time is spent with Lydie getting Agnes to promise she won't kill herself, and assure her that she doesn't stay in the house - the same little one they lived in as grad students - all the time.

The second chapter is The Year of the Bad Thing. This is when she ane Lydie are sharing the house and Agnes is finishing up her thesis on short story structure. She meets with her professor with the impeccably (perhaps comically?) WASP name of Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi) and jealous Natasha is there also, not even convinced Decker will even read her thesis (Lydie is lazy and hasn't even finished her work), while he is assuring Agnes he is very excited to read hers. Later, they are to have a final conference, which is at Decker's house (such is the economy of this film it looks much like Agnes and Lydie's), he is separated, and the kids will be away. The Bad Thing is shown only by fixed camera shots of the house showing from daytime to nighttime, then Agnes rushing out the door with her shoes untied, her coat unruly, who jumps into her car and drives, drives, drives. That long drive is not a waste of time: it tells everything again by indirection. Agnes' meeting with Lydie follows, and next day meetings with the doctor and unhelpful female university officials, but not the police. Agnes finds and adopts a tiny kitten that appears like magic and when she brings it to the house Lydie says, "Whatever you need." Good line.

In subsequent chapters we see Agnes hired to teach full-time at the university and get assigned Decker's office. There are scenes with her neighbor and friend-with benefits Gavin (Lucas Hedges). He is a comfort, like the kitten. We see Agnes get released from jury duty after she explains the traum she carries and her special outlook on the law. The final chapter is later than the first one, and provides a long scene of Agnes alone with Lydie's little baby promising to be a help to her when she grows up and encounters her own Bad Things. This was another moment that felt tonally off, and perhaps nicked from another film.

Sorry, Baby has flaws. But it's also both exceptionally real-seeming at times, funny, and more deft than most treatments of sexual assault and its effect, which tend to be overdramatic without telling us much. This is much better than the treatment of the subject in Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt. It's also better than that film as a picture of academe, even though here too the surroundings, shot at The Crane Estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts, didn't seem like a university, more like a New English prep school. But Eva Victor is a sharp and perceptive wrier and has a bright future as a filmmaker now.

Sorry, Baby, 97 mins., premiered at Sundance, winning the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: U.S. Dramatic. It was included in other notable festivals including Cannes Directors' Fortnight and is distributed by A24. Now on numerous online platforms including Sling, Hulu, HBO and Amazon. Metacritic rating: 90%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.