And… it's OK. It does maybe go on a bit and the bit of the film that comes before the "16 years later" jump is a bit formless for its admirable kinetic qualities, but the whole storyline of the former urban guerrilla (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his daughter (Chase Infiniti) on the run from a crazy Fed is pretty engaging. People like to go on about DiCaprio's girlfriend age event horizon, but such talk obscures what a compelling actor he is, and he's not the only one giving strong performances here. And it uses music well and all flows along. But I can't but feel that there are better films to be made about urban guerrillas, for all this one improves as it goes along.
If you went into Eva Victor's Sorry, Baby knowing nothing about it bar what you had seen in the trailer then you might think it is a quirky comedy-drama about a neurodivergent hottie and her fun-packed oddball adventures with friends, a neighbour and a cat. It's only the bit in the trailer where she says "Something bad happened to me" that might give you pause. Of course this is actually a film about recovery from sexual assault, a difficult subject that initially had me deciding to avoid it until a late change of mind brought me to the cinema. And it's an odd fish, dealing sensitively with the sexual assault (offscreen but described afterwards) and having moments of emotional intensity while also being at times rather funny. That Eva Victor also plays Agnes, the main character, and has reported that the film is based on her own experiences adds further heft to it. I really liked it and a I encourage everyone to see it. I also hope that Victor makes and appears in more films, not necessarily at the same time.
Some random Sorry, Baby things:
- When Agnes goes round to a male neighbour's to borrow some propellant so that she can set fire to her assaulter's office, she waits outside while he goes to get it, and I could totally see how someone in her situation would be loth to go into the home of a man.
- The way Agnes is coded as neurodivergent but so is Natasha, a fellow PhD student and her enemy. Maybe only neurodivergent people take postgraduate courses in American liberal arts colleges.
- Agnes rescues a kitten and goes into a shop to buy food for it while hiding it unconvincingly under her jacket; this is funny and relatable.
- When Agnes has sex with the neighbour (who is nice), this is presented as the kind of intimate fumbly sex real people have and not the kind of amazing Hollywood sex people have in films (don't @ me if you have amazing Hollywood sex all the time).
- Agnes has a nice friend called Lydia who appears to be the token non-neurodivergent postgrad student in her college. She is played well by Naomi Ackie who I thought was some kind of up and coming person to watch out for but actually she has been in loads of stuff.
Annemarie Jacir's Palestine 36 is a film about the Palestinian revolt against British rule that erupted in 1936. Aside from wanting to be free and not have the Brits bossing them around, the Palestinian rebels are also trying to prevent their country being taken over by Zionist settlers. The film follows different Palestinian characters, mostly from the same village, and also some British officials, including the High Commissioner, a well-meaning but ineffectual civil servant, and the oddball counter-insurgency army officer Orde Wingate (more famous for leading the Chindits in the Second World War). It generally looks great (although I had reservations about some use of what appeared to be colourised newsreel footage) and was very evocative of the period. I don't think it resolved very well, however. That might be a consequence of the history it is based on (the revolt failed and its defeat paved the way for the disaster that befell the Palestinians in the late 1940s) but I still felt that some kind of more satisfying narrative conclusion should have been possible, even if the revolt is shown as a failure.
I also thought it was unfortunate that the film has no Jewish characters. The Zionist settlers are an offstage presence, having arms imported, shooting at the Palestinian villagers from their fortified settlement, paying newspaper editors to run favourable copy, etc. but we never see them as actual people and we never get a sense of why they are coming to Palestine and how they see things there. In a film where British antagonists share screen time with the Palestinians (in a manner reminiscent of The Battle of Algiers), the absence of the Zionists is a curious omission, particularly given that Wingate's real-life suppression of the Palestinian revolt partly revolved around recruiting, arming and training a Jewish militia.
Despite those reservations I enjoyed this film greatly and I recommend it to anyone curious about how the Middle East got into its current crazy state.
image:
Eva Victor and friend in Sorry, Baby (The Travers Take: "Sorry Baby")
