There is no one right way to talk about rape, but there are definitely wrong ones. We get a blunt example partway through Sorry, Baby, when Agnes (writer-director-star Eva Victor) goes to see a doctor after having been assaulted by her thesis adviser during what was supposed to be a feedback session. “Do you feel safe now?” the doctor barks as he barrels in, obviously parroting a script whose contents he hasn’t actually given any thought to. Nothing about his brusque approach feels intended to make someone feel more secure, including the way he tells her roommate, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), to calm down (she’s calm) and essentially scolds Agnes for not coming in immediately so they could do a rape kit. “I will definitely keep that in mind for the next time,” she responds dryly. Sorry, Baby has a keen sense for the absurdities surrounding something that everyone agrees in abstract is an egregious wrong, but in practice remains terrible at dealing with — like the college administrators who inform Agnes that there’s nothing they can do for her because her adviser resigned hours before she reported the incident, then solemnly add, “We know what you’re going through. We are women.” Still, in that scene in the exam room, what gets the strongest reaction from Agnes and Lydie is the doctor’s use of the word rape itself, which causes them both to flinch back with a “Whoa!” as though he’d just let fly with a slur.
Sorry, Baby marks the directorial debut of Victor, who came up via Reductress and Twitter videos (like “Straight Pride”). It’s a film about language in ways that are promising but more often exasperating. Agnes is an English Department wunderkind at a small college in Maine, a grad student turned professor who specializes in analyzing words but who finds the ones available to describe what she’s going through entirely inadequate. The doctor’s term isn’t an inaccurate description of the incident Sorry, Baby depicts via a series of jump cuts of the exterior of the house where it’s happening, day giving way to dusk giving way to night. But rape, like attacker, which Agnes also objects to, carries connotations of violence, of a stranger leaping out of the dark, that don’t match the particulars of the painfully familiar wrong she experienced. Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi) is someone she liked and admired, a wry, handsome novelist who treats her more like a colleague than a mentee and who obviously favors her. When, sitting stricken in a bathtub, she recounts to Lydie what just happened to her, what comes through most is how deeply betrayed she feels by this person who she thought respected her, and who instead pushed past every one of her signals that what he was doing was unwanted. Even Lydie, in consoling and affirming her friend, doesn’t want to say the word. “That sounds like … that,” she murmurs.
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But if Sorry, Baby is deft about the limitations of how we talk about this kind of violation, it also borders on coy about this subject matter itself, letting its characters’ aversion to directness stand in for insight. Part of the problem is with Victor, who is not as strong a performer as the actors she surrounds herself with — especially Ackie, who is effervescent and wonderful, as well as Lucas Hedges as Agnes’s charmingly oddball neighbor and fuck-buddy, Gavin. Agnes tends to deflect with wisecracks and deadpan observations, but Victor defaults to a smirk that doesn’t allow us to see what’s going on behind it, an expression that leans more “look at these losers” than “look at how at odds I feel with the world.” When Lydie, paying a visit to Agnes from New York a few years after the assault, bids her seemingly stuck friend farewell by telling her “don’t die,” it’s not poignant but vexing, because we can’t understand what’s prompting it. Agnes is frequently frustrated by how little anyone aside from Lydie seems able to understand what’s she going through and what she needs, but the movie itself counts on us to read her mind in the same way as her closest friend, picking up all the things she can’t figure out how to communicate. That “don’t die,” as though trauma were something you come down with like a cold, sums up the degree to which the movie falls into what Parul Sehgal decried as the trauma plot. Sorry, Baby isn’t ultimately centered on Agnes, who emerges from the movie only half-delineated. It’s centered on her rape, an incident it circles and circles until it inadvertently enshrines the attack.
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