The New Yorker:

In her new film, the actor, writer, and director charts the nonlinear course of a young woman’s recovery from assault.

By Katy Waldman

At one point in “Sorry, Baby,” a new film written, directed, and starring the actor and comedian Eva Victor, the main character, an English professor named Agnes, has an anxiety attack while driving. She pulls over into the parking lot of a roadside sandwich shop and comes upon the shop’s proprietor, a warm and gruffly paternal older man. “Something pretty bad” happened to her three years ago, she tells him. Although she doesn’t elaborate, the viewer knows that a trusted professor raped her when she was still in graduate school. She has since finished her program, and her best friend and primary emotional support, Lydie, has moved to New York, prompting Agnes to fear that she herself is frozen in place. When she encounters the kindly shop owner, it’s as if he has been conjured by the precise shape of her need. He responds to Agnes’s confession by putting together a sandwich, which she eats as she recomposes herself. Three years is “not that much time,” he says. “It’s a lot of time but it’s not that much time.”

“The whole thesis of the film” is in that line, Victor told me when we met in Los Angeles this spring. “Sorry, Baby” proposes a set of ideas about the mutability of trauma: that recovery is nonlinear, that the self is fluid, that time modulates the meaning of events, that life unfolds in a mix of genres. The shop owner’s words encapsulate a belief that strangers can “see you in a way that other people can’t,” Victor said. He’s one of several indications that “Sorry Baby” takes place in a world that might be slightly magical, or at least softly impressionable to Agnes’s inner life.

Go to link