Actress-turned-writer/director Kasi Lemmons makes a smashing directorial debut with this sensual sleeper that slipped into theaters with little notice.
Don’t make the mistake, however, of letting it slip away without seeing it. A woman with a natural gift for writing and directing, Lemmons knows how to tell a haunting story about family secrets that covers an amazing amount of terrain. Taking an approach as graceful as it is poised, she lingers over her material and images, carefully melding them together to create an elegantly atmospheric period piece that works its own magic.
Visually lush with a marvelous soundtrack, Eve’s Bayou is set in Louisiana’s swampy bayou over the course of one summer in the early 1960s. The locale is named for an African slave woman named Eve who saved Jean-Paul Batiste’s life, was given a piece of land on the bayou in appreciation, and subsequently bore her benefactor 16 children.
Lemmons’ family drama centers around the upper middle-class Batiste family, who are descendants of the fecund Eve. Their story unfolds through the eyes of 10-year-old Eve, played with marvelous naturalness by Jurnee Smollett. Louis Batiste (Samuel L. Jackson, who is also the film’s producer) is a doctor and an incorrigible womanizer, but he’s the kind of charmer everyone adores. Eve first witnesses her father’s philandering when she falls asleep in the carriage house and is awakened by her father and the ample-bodied Mrs. Moreau “kissing and rubbing against each other.”
Eve may be a young rascal in a pigtails and overalls, but she’s nobody’s fool. She sees clearly that her father is “playing around with other women,” that he is making her beautiful mother (Lynn Whitfield) “so nervous she keeps cutting her fingers,” and that her older sister Cisely (Meagan Good) is unhealthily smitten with their dashing father. Her child’s plan for how to resolve these wrongs — real and imagined — leads her into the heart of the film’s tragedy.
“Memory is a selection of images, some elusive, others indelibly imprinted on the brain,” Lemmons’ script begins with a poetically dramatic voice-over narration set to dream-like images. “The summer I killed my father I was 10 years old.” It’s an opening that immediately grabs your attention. In letting you know from the beginning what happens, Lemmons then sets about explaining why and how the inevitable comes to pass, a task she handles with impressive finesse.
Little secrets leak out: A child overhears her mother saying, “He already has three children. I guess he just took care of it.” She hears her father say of her aunt, “She’s not unfamiliar with the inside of a mental hospital.” Or her aunt confess that in matters of the heart, “I’m not so different my brother.” In the same way, Lemmons slips in the details of foreshadowing. An old voodoo queen sees Eve steal a pineapple, looks deep into her eyes and pronounces the child “a bad girl.” The aunt’s visions, always filmed in stylized black and white, add to the dramatic tension, which culminates in a tragedy as understandable as it is shocking.
Eve’s Bayou
Directed by Kasi Lemmons
Starring Samuel L. Jackson Lynn Whitfield Jurnee Smollett
Lemmons’ story of pain and passion could easily have wandered into the slippery terrain of melodrama, but her touch is so fine, her method so subtle, her characters so well-developed and her cast so skilled that the story stays firmly planted on higher dramatic ground, deriving its power primarily through understatement.
Children think they’re protecting parents and parents think they’re protecting the children, but the irony is that there are no secrets in the Batiste family. They simply choose to remain silent. Eve knows what her father is doing when he claims to be making housecalls. But so does her mother. Aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan), cursed with the “gift of sight,” knows all, but reprimands her niece for voicing her own suspicions. Cisely knows that Eve is telling the truth about what happened in the carriage house, but she pretends it was something else. They’re protecting not just their mother, whom they revere as a real lady, but their much-adored father.
As their dashing father, Samuel Jackson plays a man so charming that not even his blatant philandering makes him unsympathetic. He adores his wife and children, but he knows he’s just a small town doctor “dispensing aspirin to old ladies.” If a certain type of woman makes him a hero, he plays along because, “Sometimes I need to be a hero.”
A film told primarily from a woman’s point of view, the major characters are the Batiste women — Eve, her sister and her mother, their devoted Aunt Mozelle and their Creole-speaking grandmother, whose lives come to revolve around the actions of Louis Batiste.
Lynn Whitfield as the loving and long-suffering wife has a genuine elegance as a woman who fell in love with a man who “fixes things,” but never bargained that he’d break her heart. A young girl eager to be a woman, Cisely is confused by her feelings for her parents. She defies her mother and comforts her father, having no idea of what the effects of her behavior will be.
Eve is the typical mischievous child who taunts her sister and her younger brother and talks back to her parents. She’s jealous of her father’s “sweet indulgence” of Cisely, of the way he dances with her at parties or eagerly greets her when he comes home at night.
Debbi Morgan gives a dazzling performance as the shimmering Aunt Mozelle, who makes a living telling strangers their fortunes and occasionally dabbling in voodoo. A provocatively beautiful woman, she’s been thrice widowed, which makes her the cursed Black Widow to her detractors. Dianne Carroll, an actress we haven’t seen for far too long, has a marvelous time playing an old bayou voodoo queen who is Mozelle’s bitter rival.
Eve’s Bayou has a captivating quality of sanguine sensuality, from its steamy bayou setting to its beautiful women who have a way of moving that is equal part grace and sultriness. Both men and women have a way of speaking that enhances the film’s mood, with their words flowing like honey. It’s all part of the Creole magic Kasi Lemmons so carefully crafts. She’s definitely a talent to watch. Like the memories the narrator describes, Lemmons’ rich film is itself a “marvelous selection of images, some elusive and others indelibly imprinted on the brain.”
Set in Louisiana’s backwater Creole community during the late ’50s, KasiLemmons’s gothic exploration of womanhood is piercing in conception butlanguorous in execution. It’s a coming-of-age tale about two adolescentsisters, Eve (Jurnee Smollett) and Cisely (Meagan Good), who are coping with adysfunctional family. Things begin inauspiciously when Eve catches her father,Louis (Samuel L. Jackson), with a neighbor’s wife in the wine cellar. They getworse when Louis’s strayings hit even closer to home.
The redoubtable Jackson is in a tough spot here: his middle-class house doctorwith an overactive libido is not merely bad, he’s despicable and selfish. Andthe convoluted cast of characters gets even more perplexing with the radiantLynn Whitfield as Louis’s controlling wife, soap star Debbi Morgan as Louis’spsychic sister who has serendipitously lost three husbands, and poor DiahannCarroll as a squalid fortuneteller. Lemmons, making her directorial debut, hasset her sights high, but her amateurish, pretentious craftsmanship makes forstilted results. A line from her own script sums up the film: “If there’s nopoint at all, then that’s the point.”
“Eve’s Bayou,” based on first-time director Kasi Lemmons’ own script, is a dark and complicated family drama, set in the Louisiana bayou in the summer of 1962, and told from the perspective of 10-year-old Eve Batiste. The Batistes are one of Louisiana’s most prosperous black families, and Eve’s father, Louis (Samuel L. Jackson) is known for “fixing things” all around the town, even while the family might use a little fixing of its own. While her mother, Roz (Lynn Whitfield) is a keeper of the family heritage, little Eve feels more of an affinity toward her aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan), who believes that intuition and things supernatural may hold the key to the family’s secrets that she will discover over the course of a summer. The performances are all fine, and there’s an accomplished swelter to Lemmon’s humid world.
Eve’s Bayou is the respectablefirst feature by writer/director Kasi Lemmons. It’s set in asmall swampy town in south Louisiana and narrated by the10-year-old Eve (Jurnee Smollett), who tells us in the first fewminutes that this is the summer that she killed her father.
It begins with a party at the home ofEve’s parents, Roz (Lynn Whitfield) and Louis (Samuel L.Jackson). Sullen about the attention her mother pays to herlittle brother and father to her older sister, Eve takes refugein an old carriage house, where she later witnesses her fathercarrying on with another woman. Eve’s sister Cisely (Meagan Good)explains the incident away, but neither of the girls can ignorethe late nights her father keeps or the whisperings among hermother and Aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan). When the pain caused byLouis’ philandering gets too much to bear, Eve consults Elzora(Diahann Carroll), a white-faced voodoo practitioner, who takesthe girl’s $20 to make her wish that her father were dead cometrue.
There’s a certain lushness to Eve’sBayou, created by Lemmons’ able storytelling that is carriedout well by the cast. Lemmons makes what Eve sees seem huge andheavy with meaning. And her imagination has a lot to work with.Her father, a doctor who has an irresistible charm and a knackfor disarming volatile situations by changing the subject, is ahero. But he is flawed in an unforgivable way. Her mother isbeautiful but remote to her because of her fears. Her AuntMozelle can see the future of others, yet can never predict thatany man who marries her inevitably dies.
What Eve’s Bayou captures is thepower a parent’s sins carry. It’s the force that can destroy achild’s innocence.
Lynn Whitfield, Samuel L. Jackson, Jurnee Smollett, Debbi Morgan, Vondie Curtis Hall, Meagan Good. (R, 107 min.)
One startling line, spoken in the opening minute by a calm-voiced young female narrator, deeply sets the story’s hook: “The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old.” With her audience’s full attention assured, first-time director Kasi Lemmons then proceeds to unravel a spellbinding, powerfully seductive tale that blends Southern Gothic magical realism and disturbing family drama with the flair of a born storytelling genius. Lemmons’ self-penned script concerns a family of slaves’ descendants who by the 1960s have risen to middle-class prominence in a small Louisiana town called Eve’s Bayou . The father, Louis Batiste (Jackson) is a complex character, loving and responsible as a parent and provider, but also a shameless philanderer whose nightly “house calls” to local women are an open secret around town. Louis’ flagrant tomcatting steadily undercuts his marriage to beautiful, cultured Roz (Whitfield) and adds an uneasy layer of psychodrama to his relationships with daughters Cisely (Morgan) and Eve (Smollett). Cisely, a rebellious adolescent with a big-time Electra Complex, resolves to monopolize daddy’s cheating heart with feminine wiles while her psychically gifted younger sibling concludes that black magic, not sweetness, is required to change his ways. Like Tennessee Williams, whose better works have already been cited as inspiration for this film, Lemmons is able to tap the romantic mystique of the old South while largely skirting the inherent dangers of camp and cliché. For all the Spanish moss, hoodoo-voodoo, and ambient female hysteria in Eve’s Bayou , there’s also a remarkable amount of deep psychological truth here about the dark complexities of relationships between men and women, and between parents and children. The acting is strong across the board, with Jackson especially impressive as a man of infinite contradictions, many of which remain unresolved until the end. Smollett, a remarkable young actress with all of Anna Paquin’s native talent and less of her annoying showiness, is equally terrific as Eve. But the most impressive showing is by Lemmons. A modestly successful actress previously best known for playing Jodie Foster’s roommate in The Silence of the Lambs , nothing in her career to date has hinted at the masterful and fully mature directorial talent she displays in this fresh, original first film. In a movie year already highlighted by the emergence of bold new talents like Neil LaBute and Paul Thomas Anderson, Kasi Lemmons is further cause for celebration.
3.5 stars
A movie that begins with the line, "Thesummer I killed my father, I was 10 years old," Eve’sBayou is a sluggishly paced family drama that, at the least,always gives you something to look forward to. But this isn’tprimarily a murder story, and Eve’s not really a murderess. Instead,the confused, curious title character is the starting point forseveral threads relating to women’s feelings about men. When Eve(played by the thoroughly watchable Jurnee Smollett) isn’t competingagainst big sis for the affections of her charismatic father (SamuelL. Jackson), she’s watching her mother’s emotions wither awaydue to daddy’s small-town philandering. Then there’s daddy’s psychicsister, a three-time widow who’s convinced she’s cursed. Add apinch of witchcraft here, a dollop of female bonding there, lacein some strong performances by an all-black cast, serve it upwith lovely images from a mossy Louisiana backwater–and oh yeah,don’t forget that murder–and you’ve got a Southern gothic that’dprobably be affecting if the direction were sharper. Unfortunately,it isn’t, and Eve’s Bayou gets stuck in a murky quagmiresomewhere between compelling and boring.
In a small Louisiana town, a prosperous, charismatic doctor risks losing a lush estate and a beautiful wife because he can’t stop providing intimate house calls to many of his young female patients. Meanwhile, his sister, a psychic counselor who dabbles in voodoo, has just buried her third husband and is about to spread her black-widow curse to a fourth. Then there are the doctor’s children–bespectacled, 9-year-old Poe, flowering 14-year-old Cisely, and the middle child, Eve, whose narration of her family’s story begins, “The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old.”
Eve’s Bayou , the filmmaking debut of character actress Kasi Lemmons, has all the trappings of a classic. The scenario calls to mind Southern coming-of-age novels by the likes of William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Harper Lee. Terrance Blanchard’s haunting score echoes the emotional sweep of Hollywood’s golden age. The acting–particularly by Jurnee Smollett as Eve, Debbi Morgan as fortune-telling Aunt Mozelle, and Samuel L. Jackson as likable bastard Dr. Louis Batiste–is strikingly nuanced.
That the film does not quite achieve classic status is due mainly to Lemmons’ own script, which overemphasizes long speeches at the expense of more telling conversational give-and-take. Eve’s Bayou is, on the whole, a little too blatant about its themes. As such, it’s on the level of a Hallmark Hall of Fame special, albeit an exceptionally good one.
The story opens at a party, where Eve is once again blocked from her father’s attention by her more graceful, Shakespeare-quoting older sister. She retreats to the garage to wallow in self-pity, and there she spies her father enjoying a quickie with a voluptuous family friend. The doctor downplays the awkward moment by striking a unspoken deal with his daughter–he’ll spend more time with her in exchange for her silence.
Soon after that fateful evening, Aunt Mozelle has a vision–someone is going to be struck by a rapidly moving vehicle. Her sister-in-law reacts by grounding her three children for the summer. Cooped up in the house all day and all night, the sibling rivalries threaten to reach a melting point, especially since Daddy seems to be coming home later and later, and the whole family falls apart without him. Finally, a stormy evening of family arguments–and one shady, ambiguous encounter between Cisely and her father–leads Eve to concoct an unsteady black-magic plan of revenge.
Eve’s Bayou is enjoyably episodic, with fascinating digressions into the romantic history of Aunt Mozelle and into the wisdom of Eve’s Creole grandmother, whose warnings about overindulging the whims of children turn out to be truer than she imagined. For a long stretch, the movie is merely a well-observed character study, centered mainly on the fascinating Dr. Batiste, a well-loved provider whose powers as a giver of life nurture a self-destructive arrogance.
But the film builds slowly to a true emotional crescendo, and a final voice-over speech by an adult Eve gives the movie broader, jaw-dropping implications. It snaps the story’s puzzle pieces together but leaves the final picture open to several interpretations.
Ultimately, Eve’s Bayou is a sensitive, well-crafted drama about coming to a very adult realization. If it seems too overwrought at times, the richness of character and setting keep the story intricate and worthy of reflection. And the film has something important to say about the way we understand our past and predict our future. Aunt Mozelle’s visions have several meanings, and Dr. Batiste’s seemingly reprehensible acts can be seen in more than one light. Kasi Lemmons tells us that memory, like prescience, can have an agenda.