The Power of Nature
With the upcoming release of The Caveman’s Valentine, I felt it only fitting to review Kasi Lemmons’ feature directorial debut, Eve’s Bayou, which she also penned.
Eve’s Bayou starts with a vocal bang, as Eve describes the summer she killed her father, when she was ten years old. The opening credits are laid with sparse voiceover on black and white images of body parts as seen through young Eve’s eye. These actually reveal a man and a woman having sex. The narrator, Eve as an adult, also tells how memory is really a series of selective images that come together to form a tapestry in the mind. This is easy enough to accept even before the story officially begins as any human being can let details slip in relaying information.
Flash in on a colorful party at Eve’s house, during her tenth year. We hear that Eve’s father, Louis (Samuel L. Jackson, who will also be the lead in Lemmons’ new film and helped produce both) is the most successful black doctor in town and he’s pretty popular too. Fashionable ladies standing around in their fanciest dresses, floral and silk, wait to have their turn on the floor with him. He dances with his eldest daughter Cisely, and Eve (Jurnee Smollet) sulks to the carriage house. She accidentally falls asleep and wakes up to find her father with another woman, the picture from the credits only in the colorful reality of her fears.
When he takes her aside, they talk about why he doesn’t dance with her and how much he loves his family including his wife, the ultimate Southern belle (played by Lynn Whitfield) with perfectly fixed hair and the biggest heart around. Eve does not ask about what she saw and Louis offers no further information but promises to dance with her at every party from now on.
That night, Eve is prompted by her sister Cisely to discuss what happened, but the older sibling proceeds to convince her out of before they go to bed. Cisely sits with her in the carriage house in her mind and tries to change the fabric of Eve’s memory. This waking dream they share looks just as realistic as the sequence which really occurred, almost convincing the viewer that maybe Eve’s imagination could have been at work.
It doesn’t take long to realize the whole family, and community at large, pretends to ignore the philandering because in so many other ways Louis is a good father and a supportive husband. The talented Mr. Jackson is able to play the combination of family and ladies man with such a quiet nuance that it’s hard to judge him for his sins. However, as the children are becoming aware of what the adults already know, tension mounts within the household. Every day life begins to mix with the inquisitiveness of childhood, provoking their children to see just how far they can push the boundaries placed on them by age.
Latest Articles