Diractors is an ongoing series in which Hassle writer Jack Draper examines films, new and old, whose directors are better known for their work in front of the camera.
“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.” With this opening voiceover, it is made official that Eve’s Bayou is one of those great movies about how it feels to realize your parents are just people. Roz was a little girl who looked like Eve once; Louis was once a kid that Eve saw in school; things that seemed simple as kids become more complicated as adults. Which is relatively simple in theory, yet to make this idea as profound and lived is a feat. It is of course Eve’s Bayou, one of the great movies of the ’90s, in a league of its own with how it presents memory as a form of suspense. This mystique, really a matter of perspective, plays like a ghost story in which the possession reveals itself to you when undergoing puberty.
Roger Ebert described Eve’s Bayou as “Tennessee Williams and Ingmar Bergman,” yet Kasi still comes off as assured in this remarkable debut. Lemmons bursts on the scene as a diractor, the best case scenario as an actor turned director. As we follow the Batiste family, with parents, Roz (Lynn Whitfield) and Louis (Samuel L. Jackson, in one of his finest performances), middle child Eve (Jurnee Smollett), older sister Cisely (Meagan Good) and younger brother Poe (Jake Smollett). After one night after a family party, Eve spots Louis making love to another woman, Matty (Lisa Nicole Carson) who’s married to Lenny (Roger Guenveur Smith), spiraling her into mistrust with her dad and her entire family. This innocent gesture from Cisely to not protect her dad but believe in his goodness is just apart of the tragedy that hangs over the family. Voodoo magic is grounded and fully bought into with perspective from Eve, Lemmons making this clever decision for these complex adults contradictions being wished away from Eve visiting a witch in Elzora (Diahann Carroll).
But life isn’t so easy. Eve finds her mom and dad can’t keep their marriage together as she likes, let alone the family together. It’s less about “can you have it all” than “can you love someone while keeping your family together.” Its a clear “no,” first from the audience and Eve, then Cisely, but Louis is so assured and finds that his kids pose no issue. Going back to Eve’s perspective, it doubles as something to make Louis not a threat to Eve but rather just the start of the spiral she goes down, which means she has to save the family. Louis and Elzora are both helping others but morally unjust. For as much as Lemmons is interested in perspective, the element of memory opens and closes the film. Since Eve is such a reliable narrator, the trust is already there without much needing to be conveyed from Smollett playing inquisitive so well. Yet, the viewer is being asked to be inquisitive with her, with how good the movie looks (being shot by Amy Vincent) and how lived in the world feels with being one of the best Louisiana films ever.
Kasi Lemmons is a really interesting case of a Diractor as someone who has become underrated over her career as a writer/director. Kasi says, “I’ve been writing scripts all the time, pretty much every day for fourteen years…. I have to write scripts, because that’s the only way I can write parts that will get a lot of people whom I really want to work with involved.” Yet she’s incredibly accomplished, with an NYU degree, working with Spike Lee and Jonathan Demme, being married to Vondie Curtis-Hall, plus working in education and adapting opera (?) as her career goes on. Lemmons seemingly had interests as a young person in all of writing/directing/acting, yet now seems comfortable in the directors chair with no fellow filmmakers taping back into her roots. By the time of Eve’s Bayou, she’s got momentum now as she’s the highest grossing indie film of the year. Even though she never reaches the high that was seen through here, it doesn’t deter how Eve’s Bayou gives us a beautiful new voice.
Eve’s Bayou
1997
dir. Kasi Lemmons
108 min.
Currently streaming on Kanopy and Peacock
