Eve's Bayou

"MEMORY IS A SELECTION OF IMAGES, SOME ELUSIVE, OTHERS PRINTED INDELIBLY ON THE BRAIN. THE SUMMER I KILLED MY FATHER, I WAS 10 YEARS OLD"

With those shocking opening frames from the movie, 'Eve's Bayou'(1997), I was hooked from start go.

'Eve's Bayou' is an anomaly. It has achieved a rare distinction of excellence in all departments of film making; from the direction to the writing, from the acting to the cinematography.

Here was a film not content with telling a tale of nostalgic retrospection. Instead, it shocked the senses of the unsuspecting viewers with an eerie collage of imagery, underscoring the chilling suspense with an undercurrent of tumultuous emotion (jealousy, loss and sadness; anger, vengeance and guilt) all culminating into the inevitable foreshadowed tragedy.

But of course, this is far too distinguished a film to present an easy resolution. From there spring forth the painful revelation on the very essence of memory and the perception of truth, distilled and faceted with the passage of time. A valuable lesson indeed.

Poetic and shadowy, the dream-like moods sustained throughout this poignant film is its over-riding strength. For here was a film which sights and sound has transcended the mere plot convention of its humble genre origins. Thankfully, the film turned out the better for it. Coupled with the celebrated fact that this was the product of a first time director(Kasi Lemmons), one can't help but feel the divine intervention bestowed upon this film to make it such an magically entrancing experience.

Alongside 'Shawshank Redemption' and 'The Sweet Hereafter', 'Eve's Bayou' certainly ranks as one of the most hauntingly beautiful piece of cinema ever committed to film.

A bayou is the Southern U S term for an ox-bow lake, a stretch of stagnant water left behind by a river running through level countryside after it has made a short cut through one of its banks. The characters in this film have been left behind by history in the Bayou country of Louisiana. They are nice, middle-class creole folk going nowhere. Louis Baptiste (Samuel L Jackson) is the local doctor living in a fine frame house with his fragile ex-beauty queen wife and three children including the film's narrator, 10 year old Eve (Jurnee Smollett). Family legend has it that an earlier Baptiste, a French general in the Napoleonic era, had his life saved by a local black slave girl, the ancestral Eve. She married him and had 16 children, thus kick-starting local development. By the early 1960s, in which this movie is set, the Bayou is your archetypal Southern backwater. Louis didn't get that bit at medical school about not screwing your patients and in fact it seems to be an integral part of his practice. His sister Mozelle (Debbie Morgan) is also a therapist of a sort - having the gift (or curse) of second sight she finds lost relatives by exercising her psychic powers. Unfortunately she's hopeless as to her own affairs- her three husbands, all much loved, have all died prematurely.

At the start of the film Eve, in voice over mode, announces " The year I killed my father, I was 10." Then we switch to a party at the Baptise house where Eve discovers her Dad having it off with a patient in the carriage house. He laughs it off, but the seed of doubt is planted, and when there is an incident involving Louis and Eve's older sister Cisely (Meagan Good) the stage is set for tragedy. In fact the movie is not so much about murder as about guilt, the especially keen variety which afflicts someone who injures another he or she adores and is dependent on.

On the way, as the film moves through lush swampy scenery at an appropriately languid pace, we meet the rest of the Baptiste family and Diahann Carroll, enjoying herself as a downmarket sorceress. There's no sign of the racially conscious South - as far as race is concerned we might as well be in the highlands of Scotland. The whole film has a dreamlike quality (Brigadoon?). As Eve explains, her story is about the way memory is formed often as much by imagination as by what actually happened. I seem to remember they told us that in Psych 101 but it is rather more poetically put on this occasion.

The photography is gorgeous and the acting more than proficient. Jurnee Smollett in her first role stands out, but Debbie Morgan as Mozelle the psychic aunt produces a three dimensional character from a part which could easily have been done as caraciature. Samuel L Jackson fills the bill as the charming philanderer Louis.

The film is apparently the first from writer-director Kasi Lemmons, though Samuel L is credited as one of the producers and very likely had a say in the production. Maybe it wasn't such a great idea to introduce all the main characters in such a rush at the party in the opening sequence but it's all sorted out in the end. The brief black and white "psychic" sequences fit seamlessly into the rest of the film and somehow one doesn't stop to ask just how Mozelle does it.

At the end of the day, you wonder how a child of 10 could go through what Eve has gone through and not become a gibbering wreck. At the end, she sits on the edge of the Bayou with sister Cisely, contemplating a gorgeous sunset, apparently at peace with the world. Is the atmosphere so thick, so cloying, in the Bayou, that even murder and mayhem are quickly forgotten? It's a beautiful sensuous (and sensual) atmosphere though, and worth sampling.

The ghost of Tennessee Williams hover over "Eve's Bayou". The action takes place in a moss draped Louisiana backwater, and the family under observation (in their big gracious bayou house) is ripe with desires, disappointments, and the mysterious scent of sex as any in Mr. William's neighborhood. But the notable accomplishment of actress-writer Kasi Lemmons in her feature directorial debut is in creating a landscape quite beautiful and entirely her own - a fluid, feminine, African American, Southern gothic narrative that covers a tremendous amount of emotional territory with the lightest and most graceful of steps. The story belongs to young Eve Batiste. "The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old," a grown up Eve announced in a provocative prologue voice over. But the drama unfolds (in an unspecified bygone era when well to do woman wore gorgeous dresses to parties in their own homes) is far more shape shifting than such an audience grabbing statement can convey. Eve's father, Louis, is a suave, popular doctor and gentle family man who's also a womanizer - a flaw that bedevils Eve's graceful mother and especially torments Eve's older sister, Cisely, who adores her daddy more than she should. Eve, meanwhile worships her big sister. And in reaching out to support Cisely in a primal sexual struggle neither girl understand, Eve turns first to her father's sister Aunt Mozelle a vibrant, enigmatic woman infused with good-witch spiritual powers, and then to Elzora a voodoo priestess with potent bad witch abilities. Lemmons thus lays out big themes - the little seductions of fathers and daughters - the thick bond between sisters - the power of dark and light intentions in the material world. But she covers any traces of "heaviness" with shimmering, dream state visual elegance. And she makes up for any rough spots from the movie's younger actors with with a lovely score, and a great soundtrack of classic jazz and blues.

I had never heard of this film when my wife ordered it from NetFlix, and I keep wondering why. This is a terrific flick. Jurnee Smollett as Eve is truly excellent, and not just "good for a kid," or "good but annoyingly precocious," she is just plain good. The story is wonderful, and I love the fact that the race of the characters is hardly mentioned. It's a story about people, and it doesn't matter on what continent their ancestors originated. The cast is uniformly excellent, especially Samuel Jackson (one of the film industry's most versatile actors), and Debbi Morgan. Small parts portrayed by Branford Marsalis and Vondie Curtis Hall are very nicely done, and add color to the background of friends and relatives of the Batiste family. I enjoy the way the film shows us the world of psychic perception and Voodoo, and the degree to which belief in them can affect behavior. The location filming is wonderfully evocative of the steaming south, and the direction spot-on. I recommend this film.

I love to discover that a film which I have never heard of turns out to be a gem, especially when it makes you think. Mind candy it is not.

I came across this film in the budget DVD section of one of the chain stores when I was buying a bunch of films that I had never heard of to watch when it got too hot in summer to move outside. After it had lain around for several months, I finally got around to watching it, and it just blew me away!

This film held my attention from the opening scene. To begin with, it was set in a completely different world - Louisiana, which may be an American state, but is still "foreign". The film contained elements of mystery, family life, and infidelity in an exotic mix spiced with voodoo. The story centered around an upper middle class creole family, descended from a Frenchman and a freed African slave, who bore her liberator 16 children!

The film began with a party at the elegant home of the Doctor, Louis, the father of the child Eve and philandering husband of Roz. The family included Louis' mother and sister, who had the gift of second sight and who "was not unfamiliar with the inside of a mental hospital." From that party, events unfolded, the significance of which depended on the perception of the participant. Eventually tragedy strikes, but was it provoked or did he have it coming?

Not only was the setting and story oh so different, the performances were excellent, including the small cameo roles, and the background music just so haunting that I agree with all those reviewers who found it to be one of the best films ever.

I would just love to see what this group would do with an all black version of "Streetcar named Desire."