Eve's Bayou (1997)

An Exercise In Nonsense

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

The story is set in 1962 Louisiana. The Batiste family is headed by charming doctor Louis (Sam Jackson). Though he is married to beautiful Roz, he has a weakness for attractive female patients. One night Louis trysts with married and sexy Metty Mereaux, not knowing that he is observed by his youngest daughter Eve, who is there by accident.The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews, with Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert naming it the best film of 1997. Despite the praise, it seems to have been largely forgotten, and did not merit a single Oscar nomination that year. Going in to the picture today (2016), I had never heard of it, nor did I have a clue what it was about.The best part of this movie is that you can never be sure how much is real. Because most of it is told through the eyes of a 10-year old, some things may be misunderstood or distorted. A second viewing might be helpful.

Kasi Lemmons wrote and directed "Eve's Bayou," with such precision that I'm astounded that she hasn't had anything as good since this feature. Orson Welles is still famous for "Citizen Kane" after which he never reached such heights again.Samuel L. Jackson is a doctor who has a monogamy problem, constantly cheating on his wife, played by Lynn Whitfield. They have two daughters, Eve of the title, Jurnee Smollett is awesome as the lead character of this story and her sister Cisely(Meagan Good) is also a charming child actress. The two worship their father but they eventually discover his shortcomings as a husband.The two young sisters steal this film, an absorbing, tragic family drama of Shakespearean proportions. Lemmons has created a memorable classic.

This film is now showing on cable here in Australia, and is a far better than average offering.Written and directed by Kasi Lemmons, the film is a powerful family drama set in the sixties in the south of the USA. It stars Samuel L Jackson as a small town doctor with a wandering eye. The story is told from the viewpoint of his middle child, Eve, wonderfully played by Jurnee Smollett, who sees her middle-class family life threatened by her father's infidelities.No tale set in a bayou village could exist without references to black magic and voodoo, and this film also has them as a rather central part of the plot. But these elements are handled skilfully and believably, and heighten the tension that develops.One of the interesting tools used by Lemmons is to tell and retell a story from different characters' perspectives, asking the viewer to determine which is more truthful, and indeed, whether the truth is paramount.Jackson gives a sparkling performance as Dr Louis Batiste, a man of warmth and generosity who is well regarded by the local community that he serves. His family is seemingly a happy and close one, until the children begin to question some of the adult behaviour they witness.Jurnee Smollett's Eve is the main protagonist around whom much of the story is centred, and she effortlessly moves back and forth between being a precocious brat and a young woman with powerful emotions. The rest of the cast is also very good, including a voluptuous Lisa Nicole Carson as the temptress Mattie Mereaux, and Diahann Carroll as a bayou witch.This film moves along at a good pace and is a little more than you might expect.

A family drama like no other, Kasi Lemmons' "Eve's Bayou" is a bleak, mesmerizing rhapsody of family-destruction, defiantly uninterested in peddling Hollywood-style uplift. Lemmons doesn't pretend, and I won't either, that this movie is for everybody. But anyone who cares about ravishing film-making, superb acting and art willing to dive into the mystery of family's secrets will leave this dark drama both shaken and invigorated.This film simply works as a character study, pitilessly well observed and intimately familiar with its terrain. Mrs. Lemmons based her film on a previous short film she'd made. She describes the film as a semi-portrait of her own family. Although is it quite a heavy film, "Eve's Bayou" is far less dolorous than might be expected.