Eve’s Bayou (1997), directed by Kasi Lemmons from her own script; starring Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, Diahann Carroll, Debi Morgan, Jurnee Smollett, and Meagan Good.
Eve’s Bayou is that rare thing in cinema —a near perfect film, where no important element stands out as clunky or underdeveloped. Everything about this film is excellent, including the storyline, dialogue, acting, cinematography, and score (written by jazz great Terence Blanchard.)
Sadly, Eve's Bayou seems to be somewhat obscure more than 20 years after its release — even though it won an impressive array of critical plaudits at the time of its release. The writer/director, Kasi Lemmons, intermittantly a minor television/film actress, has unfortunately only directed a thimbleful of films since then. Which is a shame, because Eve’s Bayou — her debut film — is a masterpiece. (I see from her IMDb entry that Lemmons has a new film coming out this year based on the story of Harriet Tubman, after a long absence from directing.)
Let's face it: marketing a film that doesn’t fit into a neat genre checkbox can be very hard, and that's probably one of the reasons why Eve's Bayou doesn't have a larger cultural footprint. (That, and possibly because it’s seen as a “black” film with no crossover appeal to non-black audiences.)
With major gothic elements in place, this film has a few very creepy scenes, but it’s too much of a family drama/comedy to appeal to most horror fans. Conversely, Eve’s Bayou is probably too creepy/weird to appeal to comedy/family drama fans. As someone who loves creepy and weird dramas, I think it's highly underrated.
IMHO, Eve's Bayou should have been marketed as a Southern Gothic, which is what it really is. I ranked it in the Top 10 of Southern Gothics of all time in my article, It's True What They Say About Dixie, last year for Horrornews.net.
Despite a high comedy content, most of the conventions of the genre are there — the eccentric, dysfunctional family; the big white house; the huge oak trees swathed in ghostly Spanish moss. The main difference from other famous Southern Gothics is that the family in question, the Batistes, are black/mixed race, not white. However, they are just as fucked up as any typical white Southern Gothic family living in an ancient Greek Revival house near a spooky bayou.
Jurnee Smollett (yes, the sister of the disgraced Jussie Smollett), stars as 10-year-old Eve Batiste, the middle daughter of wealthy doctor Louis Batiste, played by Samuel L Jackson, who also produced the film. The film begins with a voiceover from the now-grown-up Eve, which contains the startling sentence, "I was ten the summer I killed my father."
The Batistes live in an idyllic town in Louisiana called Eve’s Bayou, named for their ancestor, a freed slave woman who married a French colonial army officer in the eighteenth century. Historical note: Louisiana, once under French and also Spanish rule, was more relaxed in its approach to mixed-race people than the other American slave states. There were thousands of gens libre de couleur (free people of color), living in New Orleans at the time of the American Civil War. Many were wealthy and influential, like the ancestors of the Batiste family.
A charming rogue, Louis is a hopeless philanderer, who cheats constantly on his beautiful, elegant wife, Roz (played by Lynn Whitfield). Poor Roz is sadly oblivious to her husband’s many “extra-curricular” activities.
One day little Eve inadvertently walks in on Louis and his hanky-panky with a female family friend, a scene that shakes her world. She later learns that the family friend is only one of her father’s numerous conquests.
Then she witnesses an event involving Louis with her elder sister, Cisely (Meagan Good), which Eve misinterprets as a sexual assault. She becomes very angry and determines to get revenge on Louis, with the help of a local witch.
The local witch is a terrifying old hoodoo/voodoo practioner named Elzora, played brilliantly against type by Diahann Carroll (previously known for her glamorous, evening-gown-wearing roles). IMHO, Elzora is one of the scariest witches in all of movie history.
Little Eve makes a deal with Elzora that she doesn’t fully understand, leading to a terrible tragedy that scars her for life, but which also makes her grow up very fast.
In addition to the main story arc, there’s an involved, entertaining subplot about Louis’s sister, Mozelle, played very well by the heavily dimpled soap opera actress, Debbi Morgan (All My Children). Mozelle, who works as a psychic, keeps losing her husbands to untimely deaths, no matter how hard she tries to keep them alive. (Her most current doomed husband is played by jazz great Branford Marsalis.)
The cinematography by Amy Vincent is remarkably beautiful, making the town of Eve’s Bayou look like an otherworldly paradise. All of the acting is highly polished, with Jackson, Morgan, and little Jurnee the stand-outs.
On disc and streaming; it’s a can’t-miss for people who love Southern Gothics, or for well-made films in general.
