Sorry, Baby

There is no such thing as reality on film. Even the most vérité approach cannot help but reveal its construction through acts as simple as editing or where the camera is pointed. So of course the tendency for a character piece to show its subject in wildly intimate settings casts a light on the medium's inherent artifice. Used carefully, this is one of the medium's great strengths. The acceptance of construction frees artists to play around with our experience of time and continuity and causality, to use juxtaposition and non-linear events to comment on each other and give us context that could not have possibly be available to the character at the time. Filmmakers who don't wish to fully commit to jumping around the narrative (an admittedly tricky technique) may still begin their stories with a cold open in medias res. That is, a short scene set in the middle of the story, after which the narrative rewinds and the main tale can commence (e.g. Fight Club or Goodfellas). It's often chosen to quickly grab your attention. Deployed skillfully, it can set the tone and highlight the themes by calling attention to a key moment in the story that radiates out in all directions.

Writer/director/actor Eva Victor employs this approach in a distinctive way. They're in no rush to jump back in time, instead using a weekend Agnes (Victor) spends hosting her Platonic soul mate Lydie (Naomi Ackie) to paint a portrait of her life now. The familiarity between the two is beautiful, both written and performed with an incredible energy. It's full of their off-kilter humor and imagination and warmth. They have their own style of communication, consisting of joke patterns and key phrases and references to their shared past, which stretches back to at least grad school, from which they graduated four years prior. A reunion dinner with the other members of their cohort continues to flesh out how similar she's remained over the years. There are occasional hints of some past event whose impact on Agnes still concerns Lydie, which is then triggered during the dinner, causing Agnes to excuse herself. It's clear that while Agnes is by some definitions thriving, she's still working through something.

To this point, if you didn't know anything else about the movie, you wouldn't necessarily expect to jump back in time. The story opens with a chapter heading ("The Year with the Baby"), but the weekend with Lydie takes up twenty minutes or so of the runtime, making it feel like this will be the film. While that would have made for a very different film, it would not have been a bad one. Victor demonstrates a fantastic ability to imbue the screen with life and affection and background storytelling, and to masterfully command the tone of the film, keeping the humor light on its feet while skillfully hitting dramatic beats that are anything but. By the time the next chapter heading appears ("The Year with the Bad Thing"), you've got an excellent sense of where Agnes is in her life and relationships. Which is the whole point. Victor is most interested in the aftermath, about the way no one knows how to deal with anyone's trauma (including their own), the importance of having a support structure regardless, and the ways that "progress" is rarely a clean and expected process.

But in order to understand the aftermath, to form a baseline for comparison, you need some conception of what came before. So we jump back to those grad school years, and see the seeds of so many things to come: who Decker (Louis Cancelmi) was, everyone's bizarre relationship to Natasha (Kelly McCormack), and Agnes' sharing the same house with Lydie. It doesn't take long before the nature of the Bad Thing becomes clear; while Victor isn't exactly hiding it, they want you to experience the totality of Agnes to prevent the audience from defining her by her trauma. To that end, they never show the event, although Agnes later describes it in detail. This forces you to take her account on faith, which doubles as a statement that a lack of direct evidence is in no way evidence the event did not occur. Although it does make it harder to make the system care.

What follows is not the traditional "struggling with trauma" plot. Those tropes are based in real reactions, of course. But they paint such a narrow, specific portrait of what it looks like for someone to feel pain. Agnes' is expressed in quieter, more subtle ways. It's stashing boots in a closet and not taking them out for years. It's adopting an adorable kitten she finds on her way to the shop. It's the way she clings to the past, taping every page of her dissertation's draft to the window, continuing to live in the same house for years after graduation, and returning to teach at her alma mater. Even the small, wordless moment in "The Year with the Questions" when she colors outside the lines on a form to indicate that she's somewhere between female and non-binary: has she known this all along and this is just new info to the audience, or did Agnes' experience cause her to reflect on her identity more deeply? Most people she encounters don't notice any of this, or else misinterpret it. But by rooting our understanding of Agnes in the present, a time where she's still impacted by the Bad Thing but is further from it, we're given a more full understanding of what every little action means to her.

It comes as no surprise how totally institutions fail her; most of us have encountered employees more concerned with covering their boss' ass than acting with compassion. Not always for lack of trying, sure, but their inability or refusal to provide any recourse or closure renders their efforts meaningless. More heartbreaking, even those close to her cannot give her what she needs to heal. Companionship and compassion do count for something. They're the little moment to moment comforts and connections that keep her grounded: a helpful shop keeper (John Carroll Lynch) guiding her down from a panic attack; Lydie just being Lydie, while also reasserting her positive qualities and checking in on her; a romantic partner (Lucas Hedges), who's genuinely understanding and gentle and considerate, despite her difficulty letting him in. A stranger, a close friend, and a new acquaintance; all demonstrate the extent of good in the world, but none are able to dissipate the haze.

Most importantly, none of them really try. That is, their sole goal is to be there for her in the present. And when she doesn't know what she needs, it's just to be there. They've no desire to force her to talk, they don't get upset at some of her more surprising behavior, and they never treat her as if she's broken. This latter point is key. Treating someone as damaged goods is a clear signifier of trying to fit them into your box, not taking them as they are. If that's the case, why should they trust you with...well, anything?

A first-time director accomplishing all of this nuance and power is a remarkable thing. Victor demonstrates the command and patience of a wizened filmmaker, blended with the energy of an urgent story that is bursting from their soul. The pacing is perfect, the editing confident and deliberate, and the script is perfectly pitched to soften you up with a sharp joke at just the right moment to allow the following dramatic beat to land even harder. One of the movie's magic tricks is the deployment of Natasha, who's perfectly oblivious and lacks any sort of filter between her brain and her mouth. McCormack does a phenomenal job of keeping us off balance every time she's on screen. So good, in fact, that her narrative purpose land as a stunning gut punch.

In a movie full of incredible scenes, Agnes sitting in jury selection left perhaps the strongest impression on me. It's a scene of discovery, in which she asserts her identity in multiple ways. The interaction between her and the presiding lawyer is quiet, as we watch Agnes waffle over how much and what to say, resulting in more honest and frank (albeit vague) musing than ever before. We learn she never went to the police, and that she remains comfortable with that decision: "I don't want him to be arrested. I want him to stop being someone who does that. And if he went to jail, he’d just be a person who does that, who’s also in jail." Along with a recognition of the inability for prison to reform, it's an expression of the earnest belief that people can change. That who we were in the past may inform who we are now, but it doesn't have to define who we are now. That healing is possible, regardless of the source of the wound. And that no matter how dark this world gets, no matter the torrent of crap thrown our way, no matter the injustices that persist, there is always a way through.