Eva Victor sounds genuinely chuffed –“Oh my god, beautiful” – when the Listener holds up the page in the New Zealand International Film Festival programme featuring Sorry, Baby. The story of Agnes, an English literature postgraduate student whose life is derailed by a sexual assault by a trusted tutor is Victor’s debut film, and it has been a festival fixture all year.
Our Zoom call has found the New York actor, writer and now director in between festivals in Edinburgh – where Sorry, Baby had a Q&A panel hosted by one Rose Matafeo – and attending screenings in London.
Since debuting at Sundance at the beginning of the year, then heading to Cannes, Sorry, Baby has won acclaim for its frank, poignant, touching and occasionally bleakly funny story. One which, with its purposefully jumbled chronology, treats the non-linear half-life of trauma in a non-linear way over a five-year period. It’s also one about the healing power of friendship, as well as cat ownership. Oh, and a stranger coming to the rescue in the middle of an anxiety attack by making you a sandwich.
It’s pushed Victor into the spotlight, but they might have got there anyway. The 31-year-old has been an actor for some years, with a regular role on the latter seasons of Wall St drama Billions.
But the path to getting Sorry, Baby made went via a series of short comedy videos Victor started posting online in 2019, in which they played ridiculous but believable characters – such as a rich woman who definitely didn’t kill her husband, or another telling her boyfriend why they should be celebrating “Straight Pride”.
Seeing them, Barry Jenkins, director and producer of the Best Picture Oscar-winning Moonlight, got in touch.
“I think he saw me as a film-maker before I saw myself as one.”
After finishing Sorry, Baby’s first draft, they did, only wanting feedback. But a few years later, after a crash course in working with a cinematographer, Victor was calling action on themselves and British actor Naomi Ackie (The Thursday Murder Club) who plays Agnes’ enduring best friend, Lydie.
It is, observes the Listener, a film as much about friendship as it is about trauma, and all the more entertaining for it.
“Yes, I think the reason this film is able to live in comedic spaces and move through tone and genre is because of this friendship. It is the main relationship of the film. It is the source of joy – there were a lot of deliberate ways of shooting the film, too, that leaned into this pair of people being a version of soulmates.”
It’s a film set mostly in a leafy New England college town, where the names or works of Vladimir Nabokov, Ted Hughes, Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin are dropped like autumn litter.
One scene has Agnes, a young lecturer, discussing Nabokov’s Lolita with her class, and a student says he finds himself stuck between what the story is about and how compelling it is. Which is something that could be said of the film – here’s a story about a sexual assault survivor where there’s an occasional invitation to laugh along with damaged Agnes.
That difficult tonal adjustment made for some challenges in its early stages. “When I was trying to very, very gracefully beg people to make the film and give you their resources and then ask for their help to make the film, I think a lot of people were trepidatious about the idea of it being a comedy.”
It might be seen as a #MeToo or post-#MeToo film – one about picking up the pieces in the aftermath. But Victor doesn’t see it that way. The cropped focus of the film was Agnes.
“When you want to write about something that is as personal as this, it can feel quite daunting, because it’s a part of a bigger conversation that our world is having now.”
“But the only task at hand for you as the artist here is to tell Agnes’s story as clearly and simply as possible within this five-year period and those parameters of ‘how does this person experience this?’
“The more I was able to remember that I just needed to do justice to what Agnes is experiencing, the more that allowed me to not hear voices of ‘What are you saying about the world?’
“It’s more about what is true about this experience for this person, and that has always been the guiding light for me.”
Sorry, Baby is now on general release in cinemas.
