Kasi Lemmons must think Samuel L. Jackson is sexy. Of the three films she’s directed, two feature Sam and both tease from his performance and persona a sensuality unseen in most of his
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Lemmons will have none of that. In her directorial debut, Eve’s Bayou, she and Jackson make his character, Louis Batiste’s dangerous sexuality the centerpiece of the picture. She doesn’t make Jackson look any different (though for a change he has a normal hairstyle); instead she makes us see him through the eyes of all the female characters in the movie. Jackson, who was instrumental in getting this film to the screen, seizes the opportunity, channeling his usual onscreen confidence into the pursuit not of vengeance but of conquest. It works; Jackson looks at the beautiful women onscreen with a convincing combination of playa’s hustle and insatiable need. “To a certain type of woman, I am a hero,” he says late in the picture. “I need to be a hero.”
One of the many visual motifs running through Eve’s Bayou is the way Batiste touches the faces of females in the film. With his finger, he gently caresses their cheek, or just under their chin. He looks at them, giving the perception that, for this brief moment in time, they are the only other person in the universe. He does it to his wife, Roz (Lynn Whitfield) and his mistress Mattiie (Lisa Nicole Carson). He also employs this move to console his daughters, 14-year old Cisely (Meagan Good) and 10-year old Eve (Jurnee Smollett), though without the perception of seductive intent. In a film about how actions are perceived, and how they can be misconstrued by the receiver, allowing his daughters to, in his words, “adore him” will have unintended consequences for Louis.
Eve’s Bayou is narrated by the adult Eve, and she is an unreliable narrator not in the sense that she isn’t telling us the truth per se; she is unreliable the way one’s memories can only record one’s own take on the situation. The narration is used sparingly, only at the beginning and end of the film, but reliable or not, its first line is a hook baited with intrigue and promise:
“Memory is a selection of images, some elusive, others printed indelibly on the brain. The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old.”
The narrator informs us that the Eve in the title was a slave woman who cured her master’s severe illness with “powerful medicine.” As a result, he freed her and she bore him 16 children. “We are the descendants of Jean-Paul Batiste and Eve. I was named after her.” Since this is Louisiana, that “powerful medicine” implies voodoo, and the film’s notions of what Black folks call “the sight” and voodoo curses are woven into the story’s tapestry in the same nonchalant manner as Latin American fiction like Isabelle Allende’s The House of the Spirits or Laura Esquivel’s Como Agua Para Chocolate: it’s just a regular item in the day to day workings of the plot.
Eve’s Bayou was passed down from generation to generation of Batistes, and when the film opens, we are introduced to them all. There’s Louis, his mother (Ethel Ayler), his wife Roz, his three children, Cisely, Eve and 9-year old, Poe (Jake Smollett), and his sister Mozelle (All My Children’s Debbi Morgan). We’re also introduced to the Mereaux’s, Mattie and Lenny (Roger Guenveur Smith). Rounding out the characters is Uncle Harry (Branford Marsalis), Mozelle’s husband. Harry provides one of the film’s symbols, a silver dollar he pulls from behind Eve’s ear when she offers him chocolate.
The main plot points in the film are encapsulated in this brief party sequence. After dancing way too seductively with her husband, Mattie dances almost as dirty with Louis while both Roz and Lenny watch. Lenny is oblivious to his wife’s involvement with Louis, but Roz has known of and tolerated Louis’ indiscretions for most of their marriage. Uncle Harry gets drunk and has an argument with Mozelle over whether he should drive, and while she gets the keys from him, he still manages to be killed. This makes him the third dead husband in a row for Mozelle.
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Mozelle works as a reader, but more on her in a second. One would probably call her a psychic, but not if you came from my neighborhood. Where I grew up, there was a reader in the neighborhood whom people went to for advice or for prayer. She was always telling people things, and so help me, a lot of the time she was right. Not generic John Edward type things either—she provided detailed information. She told my mother that I had an old soul, which explains why I’ve acted like a grumpy old man my entire life. (“Ain’t this a bitch?” I thought, “I got somebody else’s USED soul!”) She also told me I would marry a woman who played the organ at church (I did) and that when I was a teenager, I would get hurt severely and lose an appendage. I panicked, thinking I’d lose an arm or a leg. She was close. I lost an eye.
Black folks are a superstitious lot, probably due to our ties to the South. I’ve written off much of the things we believe in, but I cling to a few of them simply because I don’t want to tempt the powers that be. We, like Latin American readers, may have an easier time accepting these paranormal phenomena simply because we’ve heard stories like these passed down from generation to generation; they become one of those accepted things. Lemmons uses Mozelle’s skill as less of an ironic plot point than it may seem, and I was grateful that a film about the past didn’t skirt some of the more colorful aspects of the oral tradition of Black history being passed down. We were always told the reader could never read her own future.
Louis thinks Mozelle is somewhat crazy. “She is not unfamiliar with the inside of a mental hospital,” he says, but both his mother and Roz are true believers. Roz visits a reader at the market, accusing Mozelle of having “professional jealousy.” The competition is played by Diahann Carroll in a creepy, sarcastic performance. Carroll tells Roz to “look to your children” just before Mozelle has a vision of someone’s child being run over by a bus. Roz panics, and attempts to keep her three children from going outside in an attempt to keep the vision from coming true. How it plays out results in one of the more morbidly funny sequences in Eve’s Bayou.
How much of what’s happened in my life was predicated on what I knew was predicted? I didn’t
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Perception is everything. When Eve catches her father and Mattie in a compromising position, Louis comforts her and sends her back to the party. When Eve tells Cisely what she saw, Cisely, who idolizes her father, changes the story around to make both parties innocent. Lemmons uses a mirror to present this change in the story (which Eve pretends to believe to please her sister), and unlike Douglas Sirk’s usage as a means of identity in Imitation of Life, Lemmons uses her mirrors as a conduit for reflection, not only of one’s image but of one’s own version of memories. In the film’s best sequence, Mozelle tells Eve the story of how her second husband died, and it is not only reflected in a mirror, but at one point, Mozelle appears in the reflection, her present self transported to the past as she tells the tale.
Uncle Harry’s coin has two sides. Several characters in Eve’s Bayou are two sides of the same coin. Early in the film, Eve has a vision (featuring Uncle Harry’s spinning coin) of his death that alerts us to her also having the sight. This makes her one side of the same coin as her favorite aunt, Mozelle. Roz and Lenny are two sides as well, both becoming angry when their spouses’ infidelity comes to light. The most interesting and surprising pairing is Mozelle and Louis.
Mozelle tells Roz “we're two of a kind, my brother and I.” Not knowing if Mozelle is intended to be older or younger than Louis, I still concluded that Louis is actually a male Mozelle, not the
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Lemmons visually represents Mozelle and Louis’ connection by two visual images of men with
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Eve witnesses Louis’ murder and is sure that it’s because of her voodoo curse. Bayou depicts the temporary rift between Eve and her father as the byproduct of a rift between Cisely and Louis. Both sisters vie for their father’s affection (Poe seems not to register, and I don’t know if that was a mistake or a point in Lemmons screenplay), and Cisely gets most of her father’s attention, which she relishes. Though they have sisterly rivalry, Eve
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Eve’s Bayou is unlike any other Black themed picture I’ve seen. In addition to its gothic feel (the cin-tog by Amy Vincent is excellent at evoking not only the bayou but the radiance of the actors’
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I guess you could call Eve’s Bayou a chick flick, but it doesn’t play into those clichés. Usually the cheating husband is treated as a rascal and a scoundrel, but it’s clear that Louis loves his children and, to some extent, his wife. He isn’t demonized in the film, which is why I’d pull this out of that genre. Louis wanted to be a hero, but sometimes, as voodoo Diahann Carroll says, heroes “fall on their own sword.” Eve’s Bayou, and Eve herself, sees Louis as that kind of tragic hero.
2 comments:
Wow. This piece brings back the memory of a film I really liked when I saw it all those years ago. Now I want to watch it again!
And thanks for reminding me of Ann Magnuson in the Caveman's Valentine. I'd almost completely forgotten that film, but I think it'd be worth a rewatch too. Perhaps its time for Lemmons-fresh retrospective...
Perhaps its time for Lemmons-fresh retrospective...
Don't forget to put Talk To Me in there too!
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