Eve's Bayou (1998, DVD)

With the upcoming release of The Caveman s Valentine, I felt it only fitting to review Kasi Lemmons feature directorial debut, Eve s Bayou, which she also penned.

Eve s Bayou starts with a vocal bang, as Eve describes the summer she killed her father, when she was ten years old. The opening credits are laid with sparse voiceover on black and white images of body parts as seen through young Eve s eye. These actually reveal a man and a woman having sex. The narrator, Eve as an adult, also tells how memory is really a series of selective images that come together to form a tapestry in the mind. This is easy enough to accept even before the story officially begins as any human being can let details slip in relaying information.

Flash in on a colorful party at Eve s house, during her tenth year. We hear that Eve s father, Louis (Samuel L. Jackson, who will also be the lead in Lemmons new film and helped produce both) is the most successful black doctor in town and he s pretty popular too. Fashionable ladies standing around in their fanciest dresses, floral and silk, wait to have their turn on the floor with him. He dances with his eldest daughter Cisely, and Eve (Jurnee Smollet) sulks to the carriage house. She accidentally falls asleep and wakes up to find her father with another woman, the picture from the credits only in the colorful reality of her fears.

When he takes her aside, they talk about why he doesn t dance with her and how much he loves his family including his wife, the ultimate Southern belle (played by Lynn Whitfield) with perfectly fixed hair and the biggest heart around. Eve does not ask about what she saw and Louis offers no further information but promises to dance with her at every party from now on. All gentile manners restored.

That night, Eve is prompted by her sister Cisely to discuss what happened, but the older sibling proceeds to convince her out of before they go to bed. Cisely sits with her in the carriage house in her mind and tries to change the fabric of Eve s memory. This waking dream they share looks just as realistic as the sequence which really occurred, almost convincing the viewer that maybe Eve s imagination could have been at work. Tricks like this continue throughout the film, blurring reality with youthful imagination.

It doesn t take long to realize the whole family, and community at large, pretends to ignore the philandering because in so many other ways Louis is a good father and a supportive husband. The talented Mr. Jackson is able to play the combination of family and ladies man with such a quiet nuance that it s hard to judge him for his sins. However, as the children are becoming aware of what the adults already know, tension mounts within the household. Every day life begins to mix with the inquisitiveness of childhood, provoking their children to see just how far they can push the boundaries placed on them by age.

But this isn t a simple plot story, or rather the plot is simple but the viewing experience is not. The characters aren t just three dimensional but carry a variety of spiritual senses which keep the viewer restlessly attentive. Sixth sense subtlety is not only respected but woven into the fabric of the youthful journey through ritual, vision, and experimentation.

Mozelle, Louis s sister, and Eve both share the gift of sight, and as Eve watches Mozelle counsel others with it, she starts to learn about herself. The sensations scare her and yet she flirts with it enough to learn how to use it wisely. The visions themselves are shot in hyper realistic black and white, so crisp and distinct that there is no question of Mozelle s or Eve s ability.

Cisely is starting to venture into womanhood, rebelliously modeling herself after her mother. She accuses her mother of driving her hard working father away, hating her and wanting to live up to her beauty at the same time, down to getting her hair styled in the same way. Through the messy hormones of her first period, is it possible that she and her father kissed without sweet familial innocence?

The emotional overtones of these two young girls aren t the only gripping facet to this drama. How a woman deals with the betrayal of her husband, while still keeping her self-respect intact, might be one of the most original feminist twists I have ever seen on film. It s also highly respectable that a movie that could have easily laid back on melodramatic dialogue instead opted to utilize specific body language, giving yet more weight to the character s action. There isn t a single perfect protagonist or a specific evil villain to blame for any difficulties, and that only makes the story more fascinating.

As for the setting in which it all takes place, we get a unique glimpse of a town that believes in voodoo and psychic powers. And though these are normally laughable ideas they make perfect sense in this context. Anything can happen and each scene is unpredictable, both in what will be covered and in the outcome of a situation. It s one of the few films that mixes eerie and playful moods within a setting that effectively includes a total exchange between humans and the land they live on. You d never guess a swamp could look so lush that these people would stay there for generations and yet there is something about the bayou that is easy to get addicted to.

Lemmons, also known for her acting abilities through such roles as Ardelia Mapp in Silence of the Lambs works again with Amy Vincent for the upcoming Caveman. Vincent brilliant photography for Eve s Bayou allowed for a visually rich atmosphere for the characters to stretch in. There is little doubt that she ll show the same wizardry again while working beside Lemmons, even if this is a different genre. I m looking forward to the next collaboration and hope that my meager review of her first project can enthuse people to go to the theater.