\n<\/p>\n
A<\/span>bout 25 minutes into Sorry, Baby, writer-director Eva Victor\u2019s debut feature out this summer, a bad thing happens to Agnes, Victor\u2019s twentysomething academic in a small New England town. The film is forthright and economical with the details; Agnes, an English PhD student, goes to meet her thesis adviser (Louis Cancelmi), with whom she shares a light flirtation and a mutual passion for Virginia Woolf. He shifts the meeting to his house, citing logistics and lavishing praise. Agnes enters at dusk; we linger outside as the shot cuts to dark, signaling hours past. She emerges in silence and hustles to her car, expressionless as she drives away for what feels like an eternity.<\/p>\n Back at home, Agnes sits in the bath and tells her best friend Lydie (an excellent Naomi Ackie) what happened in clipped, detached details. He was insistent. She tried to wriggle free and diffuse tension, he kept pushing. Eventually she froze \u2013 \u201cmy spine got cold,\u201d she recalls \u2013 and she can\u2019t remember the rest. Neither say the word sexual assault or rape, though it\u2019s not for lack of vocabulary or understanding. \u201cYeah, that\u2019s the thing,\u201d Lydie eventually acknowledges. \u201cI\u2019m so sorry that happened to you.\u201d<\/p>\n Watching this scene for the first time, my spine got cold, too. I\u2019ve watched most movies that primarily concern sexual assault released in the near-decade since #MeToo, out of both professional and personal interest, and it was the first time I\u2019ve seen aftermath depicted this way \u2013 this briskly, this delicately, with this particular balance of gravity, context, confusion and resistance to extremity. Which is to say, this honestly \u2013 a strange judgment to make on a contemporary trope that definitionally hinges on revelation, of saying or showing what is often unsaid or ignored, but a notable judgment nonetheless. I long to see misogyny skewered on screen as much as anyone, yet so often handling of sexual assault post-#MeToo feels deadened, unimaginative, knowingly freighted, even disingenuous.<\/p>\n Or maybe I\u2019m just tired. In the years since the Harvey Weinstein investigations triggered a cultural reckoning with sexual assault \u2013 and then a swifter, more powerful backlash to that reckoning \u2013 numerous films and television series loosely grouped under the #MeToo umbrella have transmuted that first heady period of disclosure that has long passed, hinging on the exposure of trauma and the shedding of naivety. At best, projects like Kitty Green\u2019s underrated The Assistant or the cerebral Women Talking wrought suspense out of the chilling clues of routine, buried abuse. (The depiction of a vituperative, haunted female perpetrator in T\u00e1r, released the same year as Women Talking, is so singular and layered as to exist in its own category.) So often these stories were shaded with self-satisfaction \u2013 a bit in She Said, depicting the 2017 New York Times investigation into Weinstein, egregiously so in the Fox News-centric Bombshell.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n At worst, such self-importance tipped into outright smugness, as in a string of buzzy, so-called #MeToo thrillers \u2013 Emerald Fennell\u2019s Promising Young Woman, Olivia Wilde\u2019s Don\u2019t Worry Darling, Zo\u00eb Kravitz\u2019s Blink Twice \u2013 that reveled in the depravity of men, each trying to shock with a pass\u00e9, privileged version of \u201cmisogyny is really bad, actually.\u201d A dominant type of trauma logic presided \u2013 unruly, unsubtle, annihilating, desperate. Even the deftest handlings of sexual assault, as in Michaela Coel\u2019s masterful 2020 series I May Destroy You, still somewhat adhered to what critic Parul Sehgal memorably termed the trauma plot: trauma as totalizing identity, hero\u2019s journey and definitional event, an explanation rather than a limited experience.<\/p>\n The Bad Thing in Sorry, Baby \u2013 for all her capacity with the English language, Agnes struggles to name it out loud, owing to an aching and believable mix of shame, confusion, fury, denial and disassociation \u2013 does mess up her life. She bolts awake at night, considers burning down his office. She adopts a stray cat. Most insidiously, she doubts his validations of her talents. But Victor is much more interested in the business of living than the logic of the trauma plot. Sorry, Baby traces the fallout of one damaging event, but also lots of other things around it that relate and expand \u2013 her job, her relationship of mutual physical comfort with her neighbor, her evolving relationship with Lydie as the latter gets married and has a baby with a person Agnes doesn\u2019t love. With the exception of Agnes\u2019s professional rival Natasha (Kelly McCormack), an off-putting and nakedly competitive weirdo better suited for a full-on comedy skit, the film thankfully resists extremity at every turn.<\/p>\n It\u2019s fitting that this sharp-eyed portrait of fallout arrives now, as the dust has settled on the heady rush of #MeToo, revealing things to be worse than they were. Catharsis and awareness materially changed little. The film shows Agnes doing her due diligence, going to the hospital for a rape kit and reporting to school administrators. Both act self-protectively, neither do anything, to which Agnes offers resigned indignation. Asked later if she went to the police, she says no, because she doesn\u2019t want him to go to jail. A small example of a conundrum made even more pressing by the legal swing against convictions of alleged perpetrators: is it even worth reporting? What are they going to do, if they can\u2019t make it un-happen and the options are nothing but protracted, expensive, almost certainly life-altering and potentially devastating. What consequences do you want? How do you live with it?<\/p>\n Sorry, Baby\u2019s argument is one woman\u2019s halting, idiosyncratic, weird path forward. Yet for all its realism, the film is not fatalistic \u2013 Victor\u2019s roots are in standup comedy, and over a taut and often funny 93 minutes, she presents a different and refreshing theory of trauma, more in line with lived experience outside the bounds of plot: violence shattered something irreplaceable, and shards skittered weeks and months and years into the future, and sometimes you step on them and remember. More time, you don\u2019t, and other stuff happens. \u201cI remember moments of it, and I can feel in my body that it was really bad,\u201d Agnes tells a gruff but kindly shopkeeper years after the incident. \u201cBut then sometimes I don\u2019t think about it, which is weird. And I feel guilty when I don\u2019t think about it.\u201d You inch forward, then you walk. You laugh with your friends, you forget, you remember, you keep going, in a plot that doesn\u2019t end but does not define, either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" About 25 minutes into Sorry, Baby, writer-director Eva Victor\u2019s debut feature out this summer, a bad thing happens to Agnes, Victor\u2019s twentysomething academic in a small New England town. The film is forthright and economical with the details; Agnes, an English PhD student, goes to meet her thesis adviser (Louis Cancelmi), with whom she shares<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10329,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[360,631,2222,1171,1930,359,646,286],"class_list":{"0":"post-10328","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-assault","9":"tag-baby","10":"tag-drama","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-films","13":"tag-sexual","14":"tag-smart","15":"tag-time"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}