Personal filmmaking recalls Todd Solondz and redeems the A24 formula.
At first, Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby looks like standard-issue A24 product: Me Too–era graduate assistant Agnes (played by writer-director Victor) greets her closest friend, black British lesbian Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who’s as smart, acerbic, and distrustful of men as she is. Their verbally explicit meet-smart (as opposed to meet-cute) girlishly mocks phallocentric machismo. Yet Victor doesn’t disparage heterosexuality as A24’s progressive devotees might expect; Agnes personifies young women’s gender tensions, the result of the recent social engineering that makes women doubt themselves. Sorry, Baby turns out to be a sensitive sociological critique. It looks at Agnes’s deep loneliness with comic compassion — another film excluded from this year’s crude, cruel Oscars.
Victor’s flashback narrative recalls how Agnes’s bright, eager countenance dimmed — from blushing at her academic adviser’s intellectual admiration to joining other co-ed colleagues struggling with their own self-worth in left-liberal culture. (Nabokov’s Lolita, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room trigger their PC alarms.)
Sorry, Baby is on to something that no other contemporary filmmaker has dared; it’s superior to Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Victor feels her way through the fads and contradictions that control how Millennials manage their lives. Her comic sensibility about Agnes’s sexual trauma is so odd and affecting that hive-mind critics who praise it miss the point. They understand things only in political terms, so they try to force Agnes’s life experience (how she manages sexual and social identity) to fit stereotypical notions of female victimology.
Yet Victor’s storytelling resists categorization. The event that triggers Agnes’s disorientation is shown remotely — in a long, time-lapse composition that distances the offense. We see the aftereffect in the way her intelligence thereafter perceives the world’s irony and absurdity: On jury duty, Agnes recognizes the bureaucracy that reduces individual experience to boredom. She pencils in her gender category on an official form that omits her gender choice. In this single extraordinary detail, Agnes derides all the blather about gender justice that’s been a liberal Hollywood convention since Barbra Streisand’s Nuts (1989).
Sorry, Baby, like Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior (2014), flouts progressive clichés. Agnes hooks up with Gavin (Lucas Hedges), a quirky, gentle male and potential soulmate, when he greets her as “Agnes of God.” Even Agnes’s hostile encounter with a macho worker (John Carroll Lynch) during a panic attack turns out differently. And after Lydie gives birth, Agnes confidently navigates the old friendship’s new circumstance (involving Lydie’s butch partner) and bonds with the infant as personal renewal.
Through Agnes, Victor’s observations on feminist and “nonbinary” issues, blending satire and self-awareness, amount to some kind of breakthrough. Although divided into segments like the TV sitcom Friends (“The Year with the Baby,” “The Year with the Bad Thing,” “The Year with the Questions,” “The Year with the Good Sandwich,” and, in conclusion, “The Year with the Baby”), Sorry, Baby flips Agnes’s mishaps into comedy.
But imagine a sitcom that eschews writers-room clubby sarcasm in favor of an outsider’s personal sensitivity — as in the good-natured calm that Victor brings to a male doctor’s impersonal questions about sexual battery. That soap opera popular bromide “Your mistakes do not define you” hardly describes Agnes, who conflates her own errors with those made by others. This natural flaw is key to the film’s winning humanism. (Scenes between Agnes and Lydie capture trenchant loneliness comparable to that in the schoolmates’ reunion scene in The World of Apu; these scenes contrast with both male-dominated culture and feckless “girl power.”)
Victor’s insights are richer and more complex than expected. Agnes and the people around her are weird without sitcom triteness. Such storytelling recalls the brave originality of Todd Solondz — long MIA — and Sorry, Baby at its best evokes Solondz’s 2000 feature, Storytelling. Since the advent of A24 distribution, few indie filmmakers have matched the Solondz standard. It’s now customary for reviewers to praise movies only in progressive political terms, but Victor’s singularity circumvents progressivism so that Sorry, Baby suggests there’s still hope for outsider filmmaking.
