Eve's Bayou. - movie reviews

I almost skipped Eve's Bayou (Trimark) because early reviewers kept saying "Southern Gothic" and mentioning Tennessee Williams. I would have missed the highly original debut film of a young African-American woman director, Kasi Lemmons. The story, set in Louisiana Creole country, is told as a long flashback in which Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett) reflects on her late-1950s childhood. The summer when she turned 10, she says, was the one when "she killed her father."

If "Eve's Bayou" has soap opera elements, the director also has a sense of poetry, and her use of the Delta countryside, with its huge moss-filled trees, stagnant pools of water, and handsome houses, is wonderfully suggestive. The atmosphere is established at the outset with a raucous party thrown by Eve's middle-class parents, Louis (Samuel L. Jackson) and Roz (Lynn Whitfield). Her father, an admired local doctor, takes an energetic part in the dancing, while her beautiful mother seems surprisingly withdrawn. Eve wanders into a nearby carriage house and falls asleep, only to cry out when she hears her father kissing another woman. Louis soothes Eve, professing love for his wife. Rivalry between Eve and her 14-year-old sister, Cisely (Megan Good), seems an equally pressing concern when Eve asks her father, "Why don't you ever dance with me?"

Louis' sister Mozelle (Debbi Morgan) stays with the family after her husband's death in a car accident. She thinks of herself as cursed because she had lost two previous husbands. She gives psychic readings to anguished women in the community, and Eve is an avid listener. Out of the blue, a gentle stranger wanders by, asking Mozelle for information about his missing wife. Told that she has found another lover, he stays around to do Mozelle's portrait.

The sense of outside forces weighing on people's lives created by such chance events is further increased when Elzora (Diahann Carroll), a white-haired local witch, warns Eve's mother to keep close watch over her children. Frightened, Roz forbids her children to leave the house, which only increases family tensions, especially with her defiant older daughter, Cisely.

A feverish sense of foreboding informs these complex threads of plot, with black and white dream sequences conveying a sensuality that is ready to explode. Lemmons, who also wrote the screenplay, is especially good at suggesting the ways in which the Batiste women instinctively bond with each other and yet remain in conflict.

Although all the actresses communicate the fervor of their, passions, young Jurnee Smollett's Eve is especially winning because of her naturalness. Samuel Jackson is a charming womanizer; as Eve's adored but ultimately unreliable father, his commanding presence holds the action together. Avoiding the cliches of recent African-American cinema, "Eve's Bayou" is a complex, exciting film that builds confidently to an inevitable explosion.

COPYRIGHT 1997 National Catholic Reporter
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