Film review

  • Sorry, Baby

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Eva Victor (2025)

    Eva Victor, the writer-director of Sorry, Baby, also plays the lead, Agnes.  She’s an English literature scholar and each of the five sections of Victor’s narrative has a virtual chapter heading.  Set in New England in more or less the present day, the film begins with ‘The Year of the Baby’ and a visit from Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who was Agnes’ best friend and housemate when both were students at the liberal arts college where Agnes is now a faculty member.  Lydie, in a same-sex marriage and resident in New York, tells Agnes she’s pregnant.  The second section is ‘The Year of the Really Bad Thing’, which happened several years previously.  Then, moving forward in time, comes ‘The Year of Questions’ and ‘The Year of the Really Good Sandwich’.  The film eventually returns to the present, another ‘Year of the Baby’ – who has now arrived.  Lydie pays Agnes another visit, this time accompanied by her spouse Fran (E R Fightmaster) and their baby daughter.

    Like some of those chapter headings, the first half of Sorry, Baby is irritating.  Her first reunion with Lydie tells us little about Agnes, except that she mostly seems oppressed and is the youngest literature professor ever appointed by her college.  That information arrives during an evening meal that Agnes and Lydie share with three other people they first got to know as graduate students.  One of them, Natasha (Kelly McCormack), has also stayed on at the college to teach.  It’s she who announces Agnes’ rapid academic promotion, feigning envy in a way that makes it crystal clear that Natasha truly is envious.  It comes as little surprise in chapter two that the Really Bad Thing is a sexual assault, suffered by Agnes during her graduate studies, and that the perp is a male senior academic – her adviser, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi).  The assault takes place at Decker’s home.  Agnes spends an evening there and much of the film’s remaining screen time trying to come to terms with the rape.

    Eva Victor describes the Really Bad Thing with artful discretion, from outside Decker’s house, almost without moving the camera.  Agnes arrives at the front door; Decker asks her to remove her shoes before coming in; she does so and enters, the front door closing behind her.  It’s still light outside at this stage.  In the next shot, lights have gone on inside; in the shot after that, they’re more salient because it’s dark outside.  Then the front door opens, and Agnes comes out.  She sits on the steps outside the door, replacing her shoes, before heading back home, where she tells Lydie what has happened to her.

    The next scenes are the film’s worst.  No one except Lydie treats Agnes right.  Accompanied by her friend to a hospital, Agnes is interviewed by a male doctor (Marc Carver).  He’s not unsympathetic, though he tends to express himself a bit clumsily.  When he says, ‘I know this is hard to talk about’, Lydie sarcastically replies, ‘It doesn’t feel that you know that’; as the doctor flounders, her reprimands get harsher.  Agnes is on her own when she meets subsequently with two female college staff, who beat the doctor hands down for insensitivity.  ‘We know what you’re going through – we are women,’ says the younger one.  Her older colleague (Liz Bishop) tells Agnes she can report the assault to the police if she wants but that the college no longer has jurisdiction over Decker who, just before his evening with Agnes, had sent the college authorities an email explaining he’d got a new post elsewhere.  If Agnes had done her thesis in film studies rather than literature, she might have known what Eva Victor as a screenwriter clearly knows:  when people change jobs in movies or on TV, it happens just like that – there’s never the tedious complication of a notice period.

    In the third and shortest chapter, Agnes is vetted for jury service.  She’s discharged after admitting she’s not confident she could be an impartial juror because of her own ordeal, and that she didn’t want her rapist to serve time because doing so wouldn’t have made him a better person.  Agnes is wary of the questions she’s asked by a legal bod (Hettienne Park) but seems to realise that the latter, who shows some emotional intelligence, is an improvement on those she met in the assault’s immediate aftermath.  By now, Sorry, Baby is improving, too:  for a start, Agnes has adopted a stray kitten (and we know that it survives – at least, she owns an adult cat when Lydie visits at the start of the film).  Victor also describes developments in her protagonist’s personal and professional lives.  She starts a tentative sexual relationship with her pleasant, awkward neighbour, Gavin (Lucas Hedges).  She’s offered a full-time professorship and incredulously, excitedly accepts.  It makes a difference once Agnes’ insecurity and anxiety are seen as part of a larger existence that’s in some ways fulfilling.

    That said, the college’s literature syllabus and Agnes’ continuing career there, aren’t too convincing because Eva Victor makes them, as she might say, Really Significant.  Given the traumatic associations of the place, it’s surprising Agnes doesn’t look to move elsewhere:  far from it – she replaces Decker and moves into what used to be his office.  In the film’s only classroom sequence, Agnes is teaching Lolita!  This sequence is bizarre in several ways.  One of the class, Jeremy (Conor Patrick Sweeney), complains about the material; Agnes, eager to show she’s not a cancel-culture vulture, points out that, while Nabokov’s content might be questionable, it’s important to recognise the novel’s literary qualities.  Fair enough, says Jeremy.  It seems highly unlikely in an American liberal arts college de nos jours that only one student voice would be raised to query the choice of Lolita and would then be so easily satisfied.  (It’s also odd that Agnes has the class reading aloud from Lolita without in any way analysing the text, as if they were much younger kids.)  Another student points out that someone is staring into the classroom – ‘that woman again’.  Agnes, glancing at the window in the classroom door, smiles and likens the visitor’s persistence to Humbert Humbert’s.  Jeremy congratulates Agnes, without irony, on her witty comparison.

    The woman staring in is Natasha who, in the scene between them that follows, not only vents her fury at Agnes’ professorship but also informs her that, as a student, she too had sex with Preston Decker.  As she drives away from campus and imagines Decker and Natasha in bed together, Agnes suffers a panic attack and stops her car suddenly outside a sandwich shop.  The owner (John Carroll Lynch) tells her to take deep breaths, then makes Agnes the Really Good Sandwich.  John Carroll Lynch is excellent in his few minutes on screen and Sorry, Baby is generally well acted, at least when the actors have a chance.  (Kelly McCormack doesn’t:  Natasha is a disastrous conception.)  Eva Victor gradually wins you over.  As Lydie, Naomi Ackie’s vitality complements Victor’s prevailing moroseness in the opening ‘Year of the Baby’ section; in the closing section, Ackie makes Lydie interestingly quieter and more pliable in the company of Fran.  Lucas Hedges’ most recent film appearances have been few and I’ve not seen them.  He plays gentlemanly Gavin with good comic timing and a nice uneasy charm but Hedges seems to be getting typecast as sensitive, essentially unthreatening characters.  (His breakthrough performance in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea (2016) gave promise of a much larger potential.)

    The discreet humour of scenes describing Agnes’ physical relationship with Gavin is the upside of Victor’s tastefulness.  The downside is that too much in the film is implied.  We assume that, as students, Agnes and Lydie were lovers – they certainly slept in the same bed – but there’s no explicit confirmation of that.  Any evidence of the pair being drawn together partly by shared intellectual interests is circumstantial; however much Lydie talks, it’s never about books or ideas.  An important, unfortunate upshot of Victor’s low-key approach is that, without the Really Bad Thing at its centre, Sorry, Baby would seem self-indulgent and inconsequential – an impression reinforced by the film’s closing scene.  When Lydie and Fran go out for the day, Agnes is left holding the baby, whose name is Jane.  In effect talking to herself, Agnes speculates on Jane’s future.  She says she can’t promise Really Bad things won’t happen in the course of Jane’s life but that, if they do, Agnes will always be there for her.  Eva Victor clearly means this coda to be tender but it’s a bit icky.  It may also leave you wondering how Sorry, Baby could have ended if Lydie had unfortunately given birth to a baby boy.

    26 August 2025

  • Central Station

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Central do Brasil

    Walter Salles (1998)

    Walter Salles’ latest film, I’m Still Here (2024), featured superb acting from Fernanda Torres in the main role and an exceptional cameo from her nonagenarian mother, Fernanda Montenegro.  In March this year, I’m Still Here became the first Brazilian entry ever to win the Oscar for Best International Feature Film (what used to be Best Foreign Language Film) – perhaps that’s why Central Station, which gave Salles his international breakthrough, has now been re-released.  Whatever the reason, it was very good to catch up with this film at long last – and, especially, with Fernanda Montenegro’s lead performance, which is as marvellous as its reputation suggests.  Montenegro’s portrait of Dora Teixeira – a jaded, crabby retired schoolteacher who belatedly discovers she has a heart – isn’t at all sentimental.  The same can’t be said for Central Station as a whole, although it does include other fine things.

    The film opens in the title location, Rio de Janeiro’s main railway station, with a montage – a succession of people delivering to camera the words of a letter they want to send but are unable to write.  (I’m guessing these are a mixture of real people and actors.)  Dora  Teixeira is their scribe; she charges a small fee for each letter, extra for postage.  The sequence might suggest she’s socially responsible and, in a low-key way, altruistic.  Once she has left the station for the day, returning home on a packed commuter train to her unlovely apartment, that impression is quickly dispelled.  It emerges that Dora needs the modest letter-writing income to help make ends meet.  She takes pleasure, in the company of her neighbour Irene (Marília Pêra), in deriding her illiterate clients or discerning an unattractive subtext to their letter.  What’s more, the letters often aren’t sent:  Dora throws some straight in the bin, keeps others in a drawer for the time being.   One of the latest letters is in the second category, only thanks to Irene’s persuading Dora not to bin it immediately.  It’s from a woman called Ana Fontenele (Sôia Lira) who, in the company of her nine-year-old son Josué (Vinícius de Oliveira), dictated to Dora an angry missive to the boy’s father, Jesus, from whom Ana is estranged and whom Josué has never met.  Dora tells Irene she thinks Ana, despite her professed anger, is using the boy as a bargaining chip to get the man back.

    When she receives a second visit at the station from the mother and son, it seems Dora was right – Ana now wants to send a more conciliatory message.  A few minutes later, she is fatally injured in a traffic accident just outside the station; Josué returns to Dora’s pitch alone, his face stained with tears, and she’s strikingly unsympathetic.  (I thought improbably unsympathetic, never mind her ingrained asperity.)  In the days ahead, though, with the boy still hanging around the station, Dora’s attitude changes.  She asks Josué how he’s doing.  She offers him a sandwich.  She takes him back to her apartment though it’s not long before she delivers him to an adoption broker, assured the boy will be sent to a ‘good family’ in the United States and pleased with the fee the broker pays her.  She buys a new television and shows it off to Irene, who’s horrified:  she tells Dora no one will adopt a nine-year-old, that Josué will be killed and his organs sold on the open market.  In an action-packed sequence unlike anything that’s gone before, Dora returns to the broker and contrives to abduct the boy.  She decides to escort him to the town in north-eastern Brazil where, according to the address that Ana supplied, his father Jesus is now living.

    The years ahead would confirm Walter Salles’ appetite for road movies:  he went on to direct The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and On the Road (2012).  As in The Motorcycle Diaries, the journey in Central Station is absorbing because it’s through territory unfamiliar to many viewers (including this one) – in terms of culture as well as geography.  From start to finish, Salles describes remarkably rituals both religious and secular.  These range from the choreography of young men on Rio public transport literally jumping the huge queue for a train by vaulting in through its windows, to the intensity of Catholic feast day celebrations in rural Brazil.  The sense of two emotionally rootless travellers – wary of, often arguing with, each other – is reinforced by the succession of bus journeys, of small bars, bodegas and roadside cafés in vast, dusty landscapes.  Even so, Central Station (with a screenplay by João Emanuel Carneiro and Marcos Bernstein from an idea by Salles) conforms to a formula that it’s hard not to think of as a Hollywood formula.  An unexpected, accidental, often gruelling series of events enables a self-absorbed, world-weary protagonist to come to care for someone other than themselves, and to discover new meaning in life.  In Central Station that someone is a child, which increases the story’s sentimental heft.

    Vinícius de Oliveira, who had no previous acting experience, is terrifically effective as Josué.  He switches between angelic and petulant at speed.  He’s excellent whenever the boy is sparky and resourceful – when, for example, he and Dora are completely out of funds, and Josué sees and seizes an opportunity for her to make pocket money as she used to:  he noisily advertises an on-the-spot letter-writing service to a group of villagers.  Oliveira is less convincing when Josué is downhearted, as he’s several times required to be.  When he hangs his head, he just looks like a kid pretending to feel what Walter Salles has asked him to feel.  (Vinícius de Oliveira, whose actual age was twelve when he appeared in Central Station, has gone on to a successful adult career in Brazilian television and cinema, including a leading role in Salles’ 2008 drama Linha da Passe.)  In the supporting cast, the standout performance comes from Otávio Augusto as Pedrão, a kindly truck driver who gives Dora and Josué a lift.  An evangelical Christian who describes himself as ‘married to the road’, Pedrão stays with the pair until Dora, encouraging him to enjoy a beer and her company, scares him away.

    Dora and the boy locate his father’s address but he’s no longer there.  The house’s current owner directs them to another area; there’s no sign of Jesus there either but Josué has two half-brothers and one of them, Isaías (Matheus Nachtergaele), a building worker, happens to overhear Dora’s questions to another local.  Isaías invites them back to the home he shares with his brother Moisés (Caio Junqueira) and they explain the family history:  when their own mother died, their father married a woman called Ana who disappeared to Rio when she was pregnant (they don’t yet realise Josué is the child she was carrying).  Isaías and Moisés, both illiterate, ask Dora to read out the letter their father wrote to Ana before he too disappeared, a few months ago – a letter for Ana to see in case she returned.  Jesus’s letter, according to Dora’s reading, looks forward to a happy family reunion, including Josué ‘whom I can’t wait to meet’.  While Jesus’s three sons are asleep that night, Dora quietly leaves to catch a bus back to Rio de Janeiro.  The sound of the front door closing wakes Josué who runs towards the bus stop but too late to prevent her departure.

    Two composers share the music credit:  maybe Antônio Pinto and Jaques Morelenbaum collaborated but distinct differences between parts of their score make you wonder.  As Dora and Josué move through terra incognita, the music is aptly, attractively mysterious; a more lusciously poignant aspect exposes the film’s tear-jerking side.  What’s certain is that there’s too much music – less would have been more – which could be a symptom of Salles’ still limited film-making experience at the time (ditto some slack cutting).  He nevertheless builds the story to a potent climax.  Dora heads back to Rio wearing the blue dress Josué insisted on her getting with money from her renewed letter writing.  (The boy, who hadn’t minced words about her ‘ugly’ appearance, tells Dora she looks a lot better when she tries to look pretty.)   On her bus journey home, she writes to Josué, assuring him he’ll be happy living with Isaías and Moisés.  When she first wore the blue dress, she and Josué posed for two photographs together.  Each now has one of these photos to keep and to remember from.

    The film ends, in other words, with hope of a more stable future for Josué, hope too perhaps of Dora liking herself, as well as other people, more now that she has experienced a kind of mother love.  At the start of the film, Dora is virtually a parasite on the emotional lives of others, lacking an emotional life of her own.  As this chilly, often dislikeable woman starts to warm up, the woman playing her makes clear that warming up also means accessing regrets that it was easier for Dora to keep buried.  Fernanda Montenegro’s acting throughout is a display of extraordinarily truthful command.

    21 August 2025

     

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