Part of my coverage of the 12th Chicago Critics Film Festival.
SORRY, BABY **1/2
Eva Victor2025
IDEA: An academic attempts to put her life back together in the wake of an assault by her professor.
BLURB: Eva Victor is clearly a talent. In Sorry, Baby, she crafts a spunky, sarcastic, and deeply fraught character who is both instantly familiar and her own squirmy, idiosyncratic thing. With a countenance somehow simultaneously sleepy and mischievous, projecting both young-adult nonchalance and malaise, she makes Agnes into a memorably messy twenty-something comic heroine à la Greta Gerwig’s Frances Halladay, or Melanie Mayron’s Susan from Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends. Like the films containing those characters, Sorry, Baby concerns the intimacy of female friendship and the experience of being a young woman at an uncertain, vulnerable life juncture. What Victor is tackling here is several magnitudes more harrowing, though, making the film’s negotiation of comedy and personal trauma feel quite audacious, if not totally successful. Often, Victor’s penchant for a sardonic crack results in glibness and contrived, self-flattering righteousness, as in a scene at a doctor’s office that’s meant to be feminist but mostly plays like unearned mockery. Sorry, Baby indicates some ways in which women are consistently let down by social systems, but rather than pursuing this thorny path it prefers a palatably bittersweet journey of self-healing that serves a good helping of platitudes along with the snippy bon mots. And yet Victor, at the center, is a lovably nervy presence, given strong support from Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, and John Carroll Lynch in a poignant one-scene part. It’s a promising feature debut from a burgeoning auteur who, like Agnes, has plenty of time to grow.
No comments:
Post a Comment