The film stars Ayo Edebiri as a black, gay grad student at Yale who reports a sexual assault by Andrew Garfield\u2019s bluff lecturer. Immediately cancelled, he complains that \u201cthe common enemy has been chosen, and it\u2019s the straight, white, cis male\u201d.<\/p>\n
An Italian journalist got in trouble for asking Garfield and his costar Julia Roberts \u2013 but not Edebiri, who was also in the room at the press event \u2013 what had been \u201clost during the politically correct era\u201d and where we go now \u201cthe #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matters are done\u201d.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t imagine why anyone would think this whiney, confused rant of a film had anything to do with the fightback against sexual abuse that followed the Harvey Weinstein revelations in 2017. \u201cThe #MeToo scenario the movie \u2026 constructs and then dismantles is an orgy (if you\u2019ll pardon the term) of glib button-pushing,\u201d the veteran critic Glenn Kenny wrote<\/a> for RogerEbert.com. The whole thing is an extended troll for those who live to find \u201cwoke\u201d alterations in everything from movies to marmalade.<\/p>\n Eva Victor\u2019s Sorry, Baby<\/a>, winner of the Waldo Salt screenwriting prize at Sundance, could hardly be more different in its approach. \u201cMaking a film about something difficult is a way of reckoning with it,\u201d the director, herself a survivor of sexual assault, told this newspaper<\/a> in August.<\/p>\n Victor chose to process her own abuse through the medium of oblique comedy. Sorry, Baby follows a university lecturer as she seeks to get on with life after assault by a senior professor. No obvious paths are taken. The protagonist, played by Victor, mounts no legal campaign, wreaks no wild revenge. Like so many, she seeks solace in the company of friends and lovers.<\/p>\n The film acknowledges the unsatisfactory nature of such an accommodation but recognises that every survivor takes their own path. It is both much funnier than After the Hunt and much, much more serious.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Eva Victor on pitching their debut film, Sorry, Baby: \u2018It felt so personal I thought rejection might kill me\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n So there are ways of addressing these issues on screen. The artistic success of Sorry, Baby<\/a> only points up how scrappily Hollywood dealt with a crisis that emerged in its own backyard, however. There were literal-minded attempts to address true stories in Maria Schrader\u2019s worthy She Said<\/a>, following the journalists who got to the bottom of the Weinstein case, and in Jay Roach\u2019s ham-fisted Bombshell<\/a>, about abuses at Fox News. Emerald Fennell\u2019s Promising Young Woman<\/a>, in which Carey Mulligan takes delayed revenge, could not be faulted for its righteous anger, even as it made a stranger of subtlety.<\/p>\n What seemed to be missing was a less explicit shift in the weather. Many of the best films \u201cabout\u201d Watergate were conspiracy thrillers (often conceived before the events emerged) that did not deal directly with that political scandal: films such as The Conversation and The Parallax View.<\/p>\n You saw hints of that post-#MeToo in a film such as Sarah Polley\u2019s Women Talking<\/a>. The members of a Mennonite community gather in a barn to discuss systematic abuse by their men folk. One can hardly imagine a more powerful analogy.<\/p>\n There were not nearly enough such studio projects. We saw fine independent films such as Kitty Green\u2019s The Assistant<\/a>, starring Julia Garner as a harassed assistant in the movie industry, and Leigh Whannell\u2019s horror The Invisible Man<\/a>, a hugely imaginative engagement with gaslighting, but there was little such movement at the top of the industry. Too risky. Too unpalatable. Too distasteful.<\/p>\n![\"Sorry,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/RLZBSIONSJVFM24MLPOWQOS3RA.jpg\")
Sorry, Baby: Eva Victor. Photograph: Mia Cioffy Henry <\/p>\n