In Eva Victor’s feature film debut Sorry, Baby, Agnes’ (Eva Victor) life can be split into before and after “the thing.” Agnes never labels “the thing” herself, preferring to let it color the atmosphere, hover above her and cast its ugly shadow over everything – a name could never do it justice (but when described it sounds a lot like sexual assault). Rather than run from what happened, Agnes stays put, taking on the job of her advisor and assaulter, living in the house she’s been in throughout her PhD. The event sinks into the texture of her life, aggressively splitting all other elements around its corrosive protrusion. Only Lydie (Naomi Ackie), Agnes’ best friend, can navigate such rocky terrain, and it’s only together, in the safety of the house they once shared, that they find a way to stitch her life (fragmented in self-defense) back together.
Victor inherits a mantle handed down by similar directors who have charted the flow of crucial friendships, marking the push and pull of the relational tide with painterly precision. She sets this drama in an old, beautiful house, on the outskirts of a college town, and this is the first image of the movie, illuminated by approaching headlights. Inside, the walls are decorated with postcards and book shelves and the sofas are draped with worn blankets. It’s a place that has seen its inhabitants grow up and collect artifacts in the process. It’s also a place that, for whatever reason, Agnes can’t seem to leave – stretching that growing up out and out and out. When the film opens, Lydie has moved away to New York, gotten married and is now pregnant, returning only to keep Agnes company. As soon as she steps out of her car, she steps back into her life and the rhythms of their shared physicality. There are countless shots of Agnes and Lydie in bed, curled under the covers, or facing one another on the sofa, legs entangled, or joking across a kitchen table littered with books and laptops. There is a nearness and a tangibility to friendship that Victor understands. A shared intimacy sits dormant in Agnes and Lydie’s, awaiting activation like a sleeper agent. It’s only when they are in physical proximity that who they are to one another in Sorry, Baby pronounces itself.
Celine Sciamma suggests something similar about the frequently ignored physical dimension to friendship in her coming of age classic Girlhood. In perhaps the most famous sequence from the film, Marieme’s (Karidja Touré) friendship group (and seemingly the first friends she’s made) jump around a hotel room, swaying and strutting to Rihanna’s “Diamonds.” Afterwards they collapse into a pile of limbs on the one double bed they can afford. Months later, when Marieme flees this corner of Paris for a new start, it’s on this bed (or one very similar, in the same hotel) that she says goodbye to her friends. In the interim between these interactions, the girls have built a robust bodily language between them; fighting for one another – brandishing clothing won from other girls as trophies of their shared success; dressing to reflect one another – complete with matching necklaces. Victor and Sciamma recognize that communality is not a wholly physical experience, but no relationship can transcend the confines of our body, either. Like Frances (Greta Gerwig) in Frances Ha explains, “it’s what I want in a relationship … but it’s at a party and you’re both talking to other people and they’re laughing and shining and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes … ” In other words: There’s a nearness necessary to activate who they are to one another, especially in the context of an early physical reliance.
Time and place can coalesce to evoke something that transcends the here and now, and that’s what Agnes frequently struggles with across Sorry, Baby’s runtime. At its best, her home and this town remind her of the safety first discovered in her friendship with Lydie, but at its worst, the requirements of life there re-embed her in “the event.” When Lydie, concerned, comments “It’s a lot right? Still being here?” Agnes succinctly explains “It’s a lot to be wherever.” Life moves, but spins out from that pinpoint – perpetually traceable. Such an idea is similarly expressed in the overlapping timelines of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. Gerwig deliberately wedges conflicting sequences together; Jo (Saoirse Ronan) trundling through the cold New England snow alone, followed by all four sisters wandering arm in arm, Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) proposing to Jo on a picturesque hillside cuts to Jo alongside in the dank, dark attic, and, crucially, Beth’s (Eliza Scanlen) early recovery meets her eventual demise.
Such scene to scene edits are imagined with purpose, acting as a narrative coil that circles into the March sisters’ own definitive tragedy. Victor’s editing of Sorry, Baby is similarly non-linear, built around a chapter entitled “The Year with the Bad Thing” that arrives half an hour into the film. Beth’s death and Agnes’ “thing” re-color their worlds (literally, in Little Women’s case, with Gerwig using different color compositions to signal childhood and adulthood), and shakes the foundation of their respective homes. As Mr. Lawrence (Chris Cooper) explains to Jo, “The house didn’t seem right without her. I couldn’t go in knowing she wouldn’t be there.” It’s a sentiment shared by Agnes, who sits huddled over a sandwich post-panic attack, reasoning out her problems with a stranger (John Carroll Lynch). “Whenever I tell anyone about it” she explains of her assault, “they look really scared for me … except my friend, but she moved away.” In both stories, the absence of someone redefines a place, and through this, loss becomes a constructive as well as destructive storytelling tool. Like skin grown over a splinter, this absence makes somewhere exactly what it is.
In Lorrie Moore’s novel Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, the protagonist reflects on her childhood friends from an adult vantage point: “I never knew what to do with all those years of one’s life: trot around in them forever like old boots – or sever them, let them fly free?” Subjectivity forces people into this conundrum: turning locations into graveyards of once-forgotten memories, museum installations dedicated to who they once were. As Bertie explains in the book, to stay is to be trapped, and to leave is to flee. Victor, Gerwig and Sciamma suggest that the answer is to live long enough in these relationships that they naturally shift, eroding and growing in response to their surroundings. Sorry, Baby makes this change explicit in its ending, holding on a shot of Agnes with Lydie’s baby, who sits cooing at a world with fresh eyes. Everything that has happened or could happen sits unspoken between them as they cling to one another, two stable ports in the shifting waves.
London-based film writer Anna McKibbin loves digging into classic film stars and movie musicals. Find her onTwitter to see what she is currently obsessed with.
