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Pop culture has come a long way from 1980s cinema’s deployment of sexual assault as a gag (a la John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles). But the grammar movies and television use to dramatize such crimes remains by and large unsophisticated. Even #MeToo thrillers and biopics, the projects that on paper appear most likely to confront the subject with the deftest hand, have been known to whiff on their promise; they either treat the abuse as the character, as in Blonde, or the character as a cypher, as in Promising Young Woman, and as such, fail to fulfill their promise as cultural commentary.
Maybe these projects can be forgiven for the letdown; assault isn’t easy to talk about, to reenact on set, or to watch on screen. It might just take another perspective on the subject—say, that of a comedian—to compel pop culture to expand its visual vocabulary for telling stories about it. Enter Eva Victor, whose feature debut, Sorry, Baby, premiered at Sundance earlier this year to hosannas (including a screenwriting prize) and sold to A24 for a reported $8 million at a festival where buyers weren’t shelling out for much. Chief among its praises was that the movie depicts the utterly life-change effect of sexual violence on a victim while simultaneously depicting how the world continues to turn, inexorably, after they’ve been attacked. “Something bad happened to Agnes,” reads the official synopsis. “But life goes on - for everyone around her, at least.”
Victor’s background as a writer for sites like Reductress, and perhaps especially their Twitter video sketches (where they frantically rant about, for instance, the bright side of the USPS getting dismantled), inform the tone of Sorry, Baby. The humor comes easily but not at the expense of the somber reality it attempts to capture. Apart from writing and directing, Victor plays the lead, Agnes, a grad student in a small, rural town trudging through her days, coming to terms with an assault she endured by her advisor and professor, Preston (Louis Cancelmi); the film takes a chronologically disordered structure, beginning a year after the attack, then flashing back to that time in her life, and to that moment, orchestrated with a chilling sense of distance—a contrast to bubblier moments between Agnes and her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who has since moved to New York City, and on with her life.
Sorry, Baby doesn’t make light of what happens to Agnes. Rather it finds lightness in spite of it. Here, humor—sardonic, wry, and silly—is a balm. Since its Sundance debut, the film has played many festivals, from Cannes to Independent Film Festival Boston, which picked Sorry, Baby as the capstone for this year’s edition of the fest. (The film’s production took place 30 miles north of the city, in the coastal town of Ipswich, though Victor’s buzz was just as much the reason for attending the fest’s closing night as their choice in shooting locations.) While in town for the April festival, Victor sat down to talk about how Sorry, Baby leans on comedy to express the experience of living post-assault. Excerpts of that conversation are below, ahead of the movie’s June 27 theatrical release.
TIME: At the post-screening Q&A, you talked about craving privacy during the screenwriting process. Agnes, in her own way, craves privacy, or certainly distance after her assault. I was struck by the way what you were talking about on stage is reflected in the movie, and I'm curious if that’s something you’d intended, or a subconscious thing.
Victor: Totally. It’s interesting, because I think of Agnes as very isolated, which is in some ways the opposite of privacy; isolation is being alone, not by choice, but because you’re running from something, like your fear that people will devastate you, and so you make yourself lonely for that reason. Whereas privacy is you saying, “I've chosen to give myself this time as an act of care for myself.”
I do think that as an artist, I crave privacy because that is when you get to really check in with yourself. It's really hard to check in with yourself when you're surrounded by voices, and people. There are conscious things and subconscious things in the film that people are telling me about that are interesting, but I think Agnes is maybe on the dark side of that coin.
Isolation seems more accurate than “privacy.” What else are people pointing out that you hadn't realized or noticed in the work?
There's very little people are pointing out in terms of threads in the film that I didn't plan. Because you spend so much time working on every element of the film, there's nothing you see on screen that's not been thought out, or tried a different way; everything you see is a choice. I can explain to you why every single thing exists in the film as it does.
The thing I find really exciting is when people notice threads in the film that were more intense in the script, but had to get cut down for different reasons. I love a watcher who sees those little things, and pulls out little secrets that are in the film–but I can't tell you [what they are] because someone will have to watch it to see them. But I do like when people watch with a curious eye about why certain things are happening at certain points in the film; there are little secrets along the way.
That makes comedy essential to what makes the movie work; if someone wants to tell a story about a traumatic experience, and they choose comedy as their sensibility, I feel like they've come to the right place. How do you feel humor facilitates a narrative like Agnes’, and also facilitates that blossoming process of people finding their own threads in the film?
So much of the joy of making a film is you do your part in creating the film as well as you can to be as effective as possible for you, and then people come to it and find what they need to find in it. That’s the joy of being a moviegoer: you get to take from a film what you want. It exists to be something for different people, and to exist in these really specific ways based on what you're coming in with. In terms of humor, it's a really powerful coping mechanism, and it gets you through really dark days. Things are so bizarre and absurd sometimes that laughing is the only way through, and I do think a lot of the funny stuff happens when Agnes and Lydie are able to be witnesses together.
Things are a little less funny when Lydie's not there, but when Lydie's there, they're this united front; they're kind of like warriors in this thing together, in this weird world. I think the reason the doctor scene, without giving too much away, lands is because both Agnes and Lydie are contending with how absurd the moment is, but they have each other. On some level, if Lydie's there, you know that Agnes will be okay.
The moment that felt more somber, almost terrifying, and still funny at the same time, was Agnes in the office with the two administrators, reporting the assault; she's alone, so it feels like there's fear of the detrimental impact of loneliness in her circumstance.
Yeah. And, when Agnes is alone, these two women are creating a real gaslighting energy, and she has no one to convene with and say, “That was weird, right?” She's completely alone, and these women are so unified.
Building the tone after the middle of the film was about figuring out how humor moves through that. There's the doctor scene, which does have some humor to it; then the HR scene, which is her by herself, gets a lot darker. And then she runs into Gavin, played by Lucas Hedges, and then there's comedy in that scene because of the absurdity of Agnes coming in really hot and Gavin being this whimsical neighbor. So, it's about finding ways for the humor to go through these waxing and waning moments in the film, and taking the audience along for that journey.
Watching this made me think about the way media sensationalizes trauma. [The film] is holistic in the sense that Agnes’ life is shaped by what happens to her, but it isn’t the entire movie; we aren’t forcibly living in that sensation the entire time. I wonder if you feel that we need to develop our language to talk about that theme.
Totally. I only know how to talk about my experience with this film, but it's really interesting; the film does a deliberate job at giving you the language it wants to use. The film calls it the “bad thing,” and the only person who says the word “rape” is the doctor. So the film is carefully moving through the language of that topic, and it's interesting reading the way people write about the film so far, because we deliberately have a log line that's meant to be more holistic. I don't want anyone to feel surprised in a scary way seeing the film, but it’s meant to hold one's hand while watching it, and it's interesting having writers use the word “rape” or use the phrase “sexual assault,” which makes sense; I understand. But it’s a really interesting experience, since the film tries to create its own language for this topic.
I don't know if our world has all the words it needs to talk about this, and I think our world really has trouble with nuance. It's good that there's more work about this, because every experience of sexual trauma is different, and everyone deserves a voice in speaking about their own experience; I hope that we get to a place where we understand how to talk about it without it being crass, or maybe not crass, but violent. I don't know. I'm figuring it out. I definitely know how I want to talk about it, and everything I want to say is in the film. So watch the film and you can figure out what I think.
You mention nuance; that’s something hard to come by. I feel like empathy is key. I wish that whenever I've had panic attacks while driving, John Carroll Lynch would’ve shown up and handed me a sandwich.
Me too. That's why I made that happen for myself.
Well, you have that divine power. You can make that happen for yourself.
Yeah. He’s wonderful.
He is. Now at the risk of stating the obvious, that feels important; that scene contrasts with the scene with the doctor, the scene with HR, where there's zero empathy whatsoever. Yes, the doctor calls “the bad thing” what it is; but he should care about how that makes others feel. Did that play into your calculus? “How is this word going to make the people I'm showing the movie to feel?”
Yeah, definitely. I made the film for the person I was that needed this film, so making sure nothing felt what would've been incredibly triggering to me, to the point where I couldn't watch it, felt important. In terms of empathy, it's an interesting question; looking at the doctor, and looking at the HR women, they’re people doing what their job told them to do. These are the institutions that make it hard for people to feel safe after something horrible happens, and they are the facilitators of that. But they're not evil in their core; they’re trying to do their jobs. It's just that they don't understand that their job is doing something hurtful.
With the professor, Preston, Louis [Cancelmi] and I spent so much time talking about the real warmth and respect he has to have for Agnes in the scenes we see him in, so that the audience doesn't see him as a bad guy until she does. We didn’t want to undermine Agnes' experience of him by showing that he has these dark colors, until it's too late, which is what Agnes experiences too. Each character being as complicated as possible, in the midst of this intense story about something really scary, was a way through it for me; it's not about good and evil, it’s about these people who are incredibly flawed, who are incredibly hurtful.
