{"id":35887,"date":"2025-07-03T17:43:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-03T17:43:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/35887\/"},"modified":"2025-07-03T17:43:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-03T17:43:11","slug":"eva-victors-sorry-baby-is-really-about-friendship-grief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/35887\/","title":{"rendered":"Eva Victor\u2019s \u2018Sorry, Baby\u2019 Is Really About Friendship Grief"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Early on in Eva Victor\u2019s A24 campus drama Sorry, Baby<\/a>, former graduate-school classmates reunite over dinner and brief each other on their lives. There they are, four years after graduation, back in the sleepy New England town to which they sacrificed their early adult years. Some are now homeowners; others are married and living in New York. Time flies, the classmates collectively marvel. But the dinner\u2019s pouty host, Natasha, interjects with a sour footnote. \u201cNot for me, or for Agnes probably, since we\u2019re still here, at this school.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a certain sense, Agnes Ward (Victor), the film\u2019s unsteady protagonist, is enviably ahead in life. Already tenured at 29, she\u2019s the youngest full-time literature professor her department has seen in a half-century. She occupies the sunlit office left by the group\u2019s former adviser, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi) \u2014 naturally, it seems, since she was his obvious favorite. Agnes is charming, with a bumbling, deadpan sense of humor; her dimpled face always bears the trace of a smirk. But behind her unserious fa\u00e7ade, she\u2019s paralyzed. She still lives in the clapboard cabin that she shared with her grad-school roommate and best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who departed for New York years ago and is preparing for a family. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot, right, still being here,\u201d Lydie murmurs obliquely while visiting Agnes, both of them bundled up and lying in dead grass. Agnes shrugs off the comment: \u201cIt\u2019s a lot to be wherever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sorry, Baby captures the feeling of being the last one stranded in the liminal station of adolescence, waiting for rescue that may never come \u2014 and the slow, accompanying grief of watching your loved ones move ahead without you. \u201cDon\u2019t wait so long to come back,\u201d Agnes says wincingly to Lydie before she drives away. I know the feeling. Nearly all of my close friends are in serious long-term relationships. Some have left our shared apartment; some have left New York entirely. I am now preparing to live on my own for the first time.\u00a0I once believed that friendship could triumph over everything \u2014 geography, schedules, the general bureaucracy of living \u2014 but my idealism has eroded somewhat with age. It doesn\u2019t seem like a coincidence that much of Sorry, Baby takes place at a liberal-arts university, where romantics go to defer reality, to hold onto wondrous illusions about what the world should be.<\/p>\n

Many observers see Sorry, Baby as a film about trauma<\/a>, and it is. But more revelatory to me are the film\u2019s quiet insights about intimate friendship and the anticipatory grief one experiences during tectonic realignments in the other person\u2019s life. A partner, a baby \u2014 these things threaten to expose where a friend actually falls in their other half\u2019s hierarchy, leaving them to feel like a placeholder for the \u201creal\u201d thing. Being \u201clike a partner\u201d is not equal, socially and institutionally, to being a \u201cpartner.\u201d There is not the same promise of the future. Throughout the film, Agnes prods Lydie to reassure her of her place in Lydie\u2019s life: \u201cDo you still miss me, now that you\u2019re married?\u201d Agnes asks, a needy child.<\/p>\n

Of course she does. The love between the friends is apparent from the first moments of the film, when they slip back into their old rhythm, cackling about men while knitted together on the couch. \u201cFor lots and lots of people in the world, the notion of \u2018falling in love\u2019 has sexual connotations,\u201d the queer theorist Eve Sedgwick once wrote in A Dialogue on Love. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s a matter of suddenly, globally, \u2018knowing\u2019 that another person represents your only access to some vitally transmissible truth \u2026 and if you lose the thread of this intimacy, both your soul and your whole world might [be impoverished] forever.\u201d I\u2019ve always loved this quote, extravagant as it is, because to me it accurately captures how monumental friendship can be. The film makes note of Lydie\u2019s absence in the bed she and Agnes once shared. \u201cDo you think you want the stuff that everyone has \u2014 like a family or whatever?\u201d Agnes\u2019s neighbor and occasional hookup Gavin asks her one day, spooning her in the bathtub. Agnes replies with indifference. \u201cProbably just to keep Lydie closer \u2026 I don\u2019t see myself getting older or having kids. I don\u2019t see myself at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Agnes is held back by what she can only acknowledge as the \u201cbad thing\u201d: her assault by Decker in grad school, a narrative void never displayed directly onscreen. We witness the events around it. Warm with admiration, Becker calls Agnes\u2019s dissertation \u201cextraordinary\u201d in their meeting. She praises his first novel, \u201chow fucked-up it was, and how it felt like a reason that I was alive.\u201d There seems to be a mutual camaraderie between them that Agnes rejects as romance. \u201cWell, that sucks,\u201d she replies, after Lydie suggests he is attracted to her. \u201cDo you think that\u2019s why he calls me smart?\u201d Decker switches the location of their second meeting, and the camera stays on his house\u2019s exterior, sky fading from blue to black. Then, Agnes stumbles home, pants broken, to Lydie.<\/p>\n

In the immediate aftermath of the assault, Agnes\u2019s faculty for language evades her. The professionals she speaks to probe for hard facts, seemingly oblivious to the sensitivities of the person to whom those facts happened to. \u201cWere you raped?\u201d a male doctor bluntly asks Agnes the day after her assault. It\u2019s technically the right word but feels hostile. Lydie offers relief from the burden of explanation. She translates her friend\u2019s erratic moods: \u201cIf you need someone to burn his office down, but you don\u2019t want to do it, I will do it,\u201d she says, after Agnes suddenly arrives at their home with lighter fluid. One day, Agnes scoops up a stray cat on the way to the grocery store. Lydie accepts it without hesitation: \u201cWhatever you need.\u201d<\/p>\n

Across the years, Lydie processes developments of her own. She is queer, a post-grad-school revelation, with a sober-minded partner, Fran (E.R. Fightmaster), whom Agnes resents. (Victor said in an interview<\/a> she wanted Agnes to confront a \u201cmore evolved, grounded, knowing version of themself, the most triggering possible person for their best friend to be with forever.\u201d) Agnes\u2019s own romantic desires are murky. The sex she has with Gavin is awkward and dutiful, the result of some obscure emotional necessity; she seems to find hooking up with men dissatisfying, and it is unclear whether her ambivalence predates her assault. Filling out a jury-duty form, she creates a new bubble for her gender and fills it in, along with \u201cfemale.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of the beauty of friendship, when it lasts, is that it accommodates many different versions of the people in it. But the lack of formal constraint is also what creates insecurity, especially when there\u2019s an imbalance of need. When one person disappears into the noise of their own life, it is hard for the other know what kind of reaction they\u2019re entitled to and what happens next. Grief is inconvenient; it traps us in the past. In Sorry, Baby, Agnes craves a more secure bond between her and Lydie. She\u2019s excited by Lydie\u2019s pregnancy announcement, but a part of her refuses to acknowledge it. Talking about Lydie\u2019s sperm donor, she muses, \u201cMaybe I should have his baby too and then they can be brothers.\u201d Maybe then they could be real family.<\/p>\n

Lately, I have felt lot of grief in my friendships, even though the friends involved aren\u2019t dead \u2014\u00a0just a version of life between us. In the best case scenario, the grief can forge something new. Sorry, Baby ends with Lydie and Fran visiting Agnes, their new baby, Jane, in tow. Alone with Jane, Agnes vows to extend the same quiet understanding that Lydie once offered her:\u00a0\u201cIf you want to kill yourself with like a pencil or a knife or whatever, I\u2019ll just say, Yeah, I know, it\u2019s just like that sometimes,\u201d Agnes says. \u201cI\u2019m sorry that bad things are going to happen to you.\u201d Trauma is inescapable, the movie seems to say, but it\u2019s who helps you through it that matters. What we see seems like the beginning of a new kind of love.<\/p>\n

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