A bad thing happened to Eva Victor. What followed was very good indeed

Sydney Morning Herald

5 days ago

At the dark centre of Agnes' life in Sorry, Baby is The Bad Thing. It is never named, but it involves her academic supervisor, an essay to be discussed after hours, a day that turns into evening. We see the curtains being pulled shut behind the windows of a pleasantly bohemian house – his house – with her inside it, but we don't get past the doorstep. What happens inside remains behind that closed door. Afterwards, we move forward with Agnes – by days, months, years – during which she is promoted to a junior professorship, keeps her panic attacks mostly private, gets a cat, is sometimes very funny, and hurts all the time.
Eva Victor's muted, witty debut film was an immediate standout at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where it was picked up by the arthouse disruptor A24 for an estimated $US8million, and where Victor won the prestigious Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Victor, hitherto an actor best known for playing a supporting role in Billions, plays Agnes as well as directing.
Their presence on screen underlines the personal urgency of the story. How much is autobiographical remains part of the blurry hinterland of the creative process. Victor has never worked in academia, certainly, but has still captured with sharp accuracy the bitter competition for tenure and a corner office. What feels most emotionally immediate, however, with the full force of personal testimony, is whatever happened behind that closed door.
Eva Victor is 31, was born in Paris, grew up in San Francisco and went to a French-language school, where they had a classic adolescent engagement with existentialism. 'I remember reading Camus' The Stranger and thinking, 'Yeah, everything sucks',' they told Variety. 'And I just felt seen.'
There was a gradual queer coming-out during university and Victor now identifies as non-binary, using both 'she' and 'they' pronouns. 'Non-binary for me has always been the space in-between,' they told Vogue. 'And that's the thing that people are really uncomfortable with. The idea of, 'I can't totally figure you out.' But it's a huge gift to give to yourself: to think you could be more than one thing, that you could be limitless.'
Victor was a writer and editor on the satirical feminist website Reductress before being lured into filmmaking; their comic vignettes on YouTube acquired an enthusiastic following that included director Barry Jenkins, whose exquisite gay romance Moonlight won the Best Picture Oscar in 2017. The pair found each other on Twitter; he watched Victor's short films, he said later, and thought 'this person is clearly a filmmaker'. Meanwhile, Victor was writing. Sorry, Baby was not their first script, by any means. 'As a writer, you write and write,' they say. 'And when someone wants to make something, that's your first thing.'
Sorry, Baby was written during COVID, while Victor holed up in a cabin with a rescue kitten (on Victor's Instagram feed, they vouch for the healing power of cats and declare they would never make a film in which anything 'remotely sad' happened to one).
Victor was working through depression during this period. 'One time I heard someone say they didn't have anxiety or depression, and I was like, 'I don't believe you',' they told Vogue. 'And if it's true, that must be very lonely.'
When the script was completed, Jenkins urged Victor to take it to Pastel, the production company he runs with Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak. There followed a long apprenticeship during which Victor was able to shadow trans filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun as they made I Saw the TV Glow.
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'Having made the film, I have a different kind of respect for just how hard it is to make a film and how much heart has to be behind it in order for it to make sense in your life, because it's so intense an experience,' Victor says now. 'So it feels good that as my first film it very much came from inside of me. It's also intense because it has me all over it.'
Agnes is not Victor, however; if anything, the difference between them establishes the distance between real events, whatever they are, and the fable of suffering and healing woven within the film. 'I got to create this character who is definitely, yes, partly me but is also this aspirational figure, because she is very blunt and she is really comfortable with silence. I wanted to write someone who felt like in my family but not me. The fictionalising was very joyful too.'
Many directors say how hard it is to direct themselves, but that wasn't Victor's experience. 'I really didn't think of her as myself. I always spoke about 'Agnes'. Everyone did that. It was very cool directing myself, like I was giving myself notes, but I didn't have to have a conversation with myself.'
Victor's real-life rejection of gender definition finds playful expression in Sorry, Baby when Agnes has to identify her gender on a registration form for jury duty. She ticks female, then doodles a little two-way arrow to the 'male' box, allowing herself a naughty snicker. 'We're told there's boys and girls, but that doesn't feel totally right. So she makes her own little bubble on where she lands on some kind of spectrum,' Victor says.
Agnes' best friend and roommate, Lydia – played by English actor Naomi Ackie – is gay and, over the course of the story, falls in love and has a baby. The friends find themselves at very different stages in life. 'Lydia is in this whole place of thinking about bringing life into the world and Agnes is just trying to survive,' Victor says. As much as Sorry, Baby is about trauma, it is also about different kinds of identity.
The source of trauma is never described as rape. When Agnes comes home and tells Lydia what happened to her, it is an account of loss of agency and will rather than being physically overpowered, of hitherto certain lines crossed and defences breached. Agnes is her professor Preston Decker's favourite. Louis Cancelmi – another Billions alumnus – makes Decker professorially genial. She admires him; they bond over the writers they love best; he encourages her literary criticism. They banter in tutorials.
'It was important to us that he was charismatic and warm, like this creative partner for Agnes,' Victor says. When Agnes describes Decker pushing his hand down her pants, we share her sheer shock, which is followed by confusion. Rather than unleashing fury, she withdraws into her hurt self.
'I think the film is reckoning with the idea that revenge doesn't always feel like the most honest reaction,' Victor says. 'Because I don't think the reaction to this kind of experience is an eye for an eye. So much of the response is trying to wrap your head around the fact that someone can do such a cruel thing, but also be a person. Later in the film, she says, 'I don't want him to die'. I think in some ways she's a bit disappointed that it's not as simple as that.'
Agnes gives up on reporting Decker's crime to anybody after a (very funny) encounter with the university's HR department. The police are not involved; she doesn't want him to go to jail because, as Victor also believes, he would still be a person who was capable of doing The Bad Thing, just banged up in a different place. 'That won't change a thing. Probably her dream would be to know he's thought about it enough and understood it enough that he would never do anything like this again. But there's no path for justice that we know in our society that works that way,' Victor says.
Victor made the decision early not to show what happened. 'I think I never wanted to put my audience through a scene like that because we see it so often. But when people ask about it, something I think about is, 'Who's the camera? Who is the one watching?' It's hard for me to imagine where the camera would go.'
There are works that focus on the experience of violence that are powerful; they cite I May Destroy You, where the pivotal rape is shot from the victim's point of view – but that wasn't their approach. 'Also, we often hear stories about horrible things that happen to people and we never get to witness them. We have to reckon with the fact we can't witness everything. I wanted the film to have this belief that Agnes' words are enough.'
Agnes isn't the kind to wallow in pain; it creeps up on her. She tries for sexual intimacy with her amiable neighbour Gavin (Lucas Hedges) but the moment escapes her. 'It's not violent, but it's going through the motions of something that it feels like she's not really there for,' Victor says. 'One of the things this kind of trauma does is divorce the body from the spirit. I think it's a very surreal thing to understand that the rule we're told, that your body is your own, can be broken by someone. That is a very sad, daunting thing to come to terms with. In this case, it makes Agnes start from scratch with her body again.'
That certainly speaks of Eva Victor's experience. 'I spent years floating, just trying to accept that I went through something bad,' they have said. ' Sorry, Baby honours those years lost. The quiet years where you still have to go to work surrounded by constant reminders, reminders that are invisible to others, that you're not like everyone else. The years where your friend's support can save your life, and where strangers can often make you feel safer than the people you're told to trust.'
Lydia, Agnes' roommate, is a direct portrait of a friend Victor made in theatre camp as a teenager. They still call each other every day. John Carroll Lynch plays that invaluable stranger, who sees Agnes having a panic attack near his roadside sandwich bar, talks her through it, makes her a sandwich and sits on the kerb with her, munching companionably.
Despite its dark background, Sorry, Baby is full of these moments of whimsy and lightheartedness. Hedges, speaking to Variety, compared Victor to Kenneth Lonergan, the master of downbeat realism who directed him in Manchester by the Sea, before saying they are not really like anyone. There is just as much in Victor of the spirit of Miranda July: in their chapter headings, off-kilter jokes and intimacy, something like reading a journal with cartoons in the margin. Victor cites Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women as a touchstone for this film, but is just as enthused by the raunchy Mexican sex comedy Y tu mama tambien, Alfonso Cuaron's breakthrough hit.
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Eva Victor refuses to be limited by genre or gender. It will be fascinating to see what they do next.
Sorry, Baby is at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which runs August 7-24, and in cinemas from September 4; miff.com.au.