Eva Victor walks a tightrope with “Sorry, Baby,” a risk-taking feature debut that extracts both tears and laughter in its depiction of the unbreakable bond between a New England literature academic and her best friend as one navigates the aftermath of a sexual assault.
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With some key advice from acclaimed filmmaker Barry Jenkins, The award-winning Victor (who uses they/she pronouns and is best known for their popular viral videos) sought to reflect the healing process through the rock-solid friendship of the stuck-in-a-rut Agnes (Victor) — whose life gets upended by that traumatic event — and best friend/former grad student Lydie (Naomi Ackie) — who is leading a vibrant new life in New York.
Victor states that intention from the first scene in an award-winning screenplay that jumps forward and backward in time.
“I really wanted to start the film with the joy of friendship,” Victor explained. “And I wanted to be very clear that we’re allowed to laugh, that we’re allowed to feel safe. We are part of this dynamic. We are in on the inside joke of this world. I wanted us to have sort of an experience of falling in love with these friends so that when we go back in time we really do care what happened.”
Victor’s indie film, which opens in select theaters on July 4, debuted at Sundance Film Fest in Utah, where it won Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and sparked a brief bidding war before A24 landed the rights.
“Sorry, Baby” comes from a personal place for Victor and was written during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. What spurred her into writing it was binge-watching countless films during that tense time.
“I knew I wanted to write about this and sort of at the same time fell in love with all these films I’d never even heard of that felt like these escapes but then had this really loud heartbeat,” they said. “I was in this very dark New York apartment and I didn’t have any company besides my cat and it felt like the films were keeping me company in this way that felt kind of like life saving. … I feel lucky to have been able to discover films as an adult because I didn’t really go to school for film and it was like this gift waiting for me when I needed it most.”
From there, Victor holed away in a Maine cabin to write the first draft of “Sorry, Baby” (it didn’t go through many rewrites). Then she shot it over to Oscar-winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”), who co-founded Pastel with two others as part of his quest to find and nurture up-and-coming talent. Jenkins knew Victor from their videos, and it was only a matter of time before it got suggested that Victor not only star in the film, but direct it as well.
“(Jenkins) met with me before I sent him the script and he kind of reassured me that the videos I was making had filmmaking qualities to them and it seemed like a filmmaker was behind them,” Victor says: “He’s a force of nature. He is so inspiring, both as a filmmaker and energetically. He comes in with so much energy and it’s so helpful. I’m quite introverted and anxious and when he comes, he kind of just blows open the door and brings new life to whatever’s going on.”
Once Victor signed up to direct, they participated in what the production notes described as a year-long filmmaking bootcamp that found Victor shadowing Jane Schoenbrun on the set of “I Saw the TV Glow.”
Crucial to making “Sorry, Baby” was casting Lydie – a compassionate, caring person who’s embracing her queerness and is a concrete support beam for Agnes, who’s remained in New England where she attended grad school and was assaulted.
Enter Ackie of “Mickey 17” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”
“Naomi, in my opinion, could have chemistry with a wall,” Victor said. “I think she can do anything in the entire world. But honestly we met and I became obsessed with her and I was like I want her to like me. I just felt she was so cool and nice and she was so special. And then we read a couple scenes together and there’s this line she says in the film that (Lydie) says about her baby; she says ‘I want to make a really good person’ and when she said that and we read together I felt like this whole person just flew off the page and emerged.”
Others in the standout cast including Lucas Hedges as a quirky, sweet next door neighbor of Agnes’s, character actor John Carroll Lynch as a sandwich shop owner who comes to Agnes’s aid at a crucial moment and Louis Cancelmi — who appeared with Victor in the series “Billions” — as Agnes’s professor adviser. Even the two feline actors that portray Agnes’s cat Olga are well cast.
One of “Sorry, Baby’s” most deliberately thought-out sequences is the assault — not shown on camera. Victor knew what they wanted to do, and what they didn’t want to do, with that sequence.
“I always knew we weren’t going to go inside the house,” they said. “I always knew that we needed to stay outside … I wanted to give her the respect of us being with her emotionally and not sort of this objective viewer in some way. And I also just didn’t want to make a film that had violence in it like that. We were very, very deliberate about how that series of shots … worked.”
Another subtext to “Sorry, Baby” is a much happier one, a celebration of queer families and friendships, both for Lydie and then Agnes.
“Agnes also goes through this sort of rebuilding herself and discovering her own queerness and her own gender expression and there’s sort of this experience that I think happens for her — of she goes through this really traumatic thing that sort of breaks all the rules that she was taught — like that’s your body, you get to control it, there are women, there are men. All these rules that the world has taught her and she realizes that these aren’t real and then without choosing it, has to rebuild who she is and part of that is letting go of the rules that aren’t serving her.”
Getting to address and talk about the queerness of “Sorry, Baby” appeals to Victor.
“I think queerness is such an important part of my life and what gives me joy in the world,” they said. “I feel really grateful when I get to talk about it because it’s really interesting who misses the queerness of the film. It seems really obvious to me and it’s also something that I think is potentially invisible to some people.”