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Starring Jurnee Smollett, Samuel L. Jackson, Debbi Morgan, Lynn Whitfield, Diahann Carroll,
Meagan Good, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Branford Marsalis. Directed by Kasi Lemmons.
"The summer I killed my father I was 10 years old." So recalls Eve Batiste (Smollett), the daughter of a prosperous Creole doctor Louis (Jackson). They live in an atmospheric town called Eve's Bayou, named after a slave woman who helped a soldier Jean Batiste recover from his injuries, and then bore him 16 children. The residents of the town are the descendents of this union, where French is still sometimes spoken. Young Eve has been named after the town's founder. At a party at the family estate, Louis' mother says "I swear to God, every women in the parish must be thinking he's the second coming." And they do. Eve is upset after spotting Daddy getting up close and personal with a buxom woman. While Daddy insists he loves her, his other children and his elegant wife (Whitfield), she is confused by the inconsistent morality of adulthood. She is also jealous of her older sister Sisely (Good) - her father dances with Sisely, in a very public display of his pride for her, but does not with Eve. Throughout the film, she finds Daddy spends a lot of his time "easing the pain" of young and beautiful female clients who don't appear to be too sick to Eve. Eve has a kindred spirit in Louis' sister Mosell (Morgan). Mosell has had three husbands, and all have died. And like the original town's namesake Eve, she has the ability to foresee the future. She dabbles with fortune-telling as a way of making money, with Eve watching and learning about the problems of the world. While demoralized by her misfortunes, she nevertheless eases Eve into the adult world. She has a local rival in a voodoo priestess (Carroll), who predicts bad things for her next husband. And wouldn't you know it - a handsome stranger (Curtis-Hall, who is also the husband of the director) arrives in town to have his fortune read, and stays for Mosell's "home cooking". After a particularly intense fight between her parents, Sisely refuses to eat or talk for days. Eventually she confides in Eve a particularly horrifying secret about their father, and swears Eve to secrecy. Eve is so angry at her father, she wants him dead, and enlists the services of the voodoo priestess, and eventually other more temporal measures. But she comes to discover events she thought she understood were not as they seemed. This is the directorial debut of Lemmons, best known as Jodie Foster's friend in Silence of the Lambs. The film is a unique, atmospheric look at the early 1960's in southern Louisiana. The costumes are authentic, and the cinematography superb - you can feel yourself transported to another era, with tall trees, gleaming, sunlit water, and misty mornings along the bayou. For the most, part the performances are great too. Jollett is adorable as Eve, and brings a mischievousness and brightness to her role, although she's not quite the second coming that some have described her as. Morgan is outstanding as the world-weary Mosell, who like her brother, is no stranger to betrayal and infidelity. Jackson is, as usual, excellent, bringing a smooth charm to his portrayal of a man struggling to overcome his weakness with women, although not struggling too hard. Especially good is Good, who plays a young lady making the difficult transition into womanhood. Not as strong as the rest is Whitfield, who comes off slightly unreal and airy, as if she's a character in a Tennessee Williams play. While there are some outstanding, memorable scenes in Eve's Bayou, the film's story is uneven. One excellent scene involves Mosell telling Eve about how her own infidelity led to the death of her first husband. The scene seamlessly moves between Mosell and her dead husband recalling the tragic events. When Mosell receives a vision of the future, the film moves into stark black and white images of events, consistently energizing the movie, and make the concept of seeing visions realistic and possible. But the entire mysterious-stranger-arrving-in-town is jarringly hokey, like out of a bad soap opera, and not in keeping with the tone of the rest of the film. The voodoo priestess interactions with both the mother and Mosell, and later Eve, also take away from the realistic tone that the movie had going. The conclusion to the film could be spotted well in advance, although the ending provides a somewhat shocking twist to Sisely and Eve's secret. To its credit, the film handles the infidelity theme, as well as the loss of innocence of Eve and Sisely, with subtlety, and even-handedly. It shows characters struggling to be good, but falling well short of that goal.   |