Even now, Louisiana must surely be a hot, slow place, and it was even hotter and slower in 1962.
Kasi Lemmons’s debut film captures the sticky heaviness of summer afternoons in the South, especially for a child—Jurnee Smollett’s sparky, willful Eve Batiste is ten years old—with few places to go, a child who must come back again and again to the same people, places, and ideas. But this isn’t a movie where the heat weighs anyone down. Instead, subtly, it shifts to what that heat means: all the particles vibrating, moving faster than they were a few weeks ago, agitating everything. The humidity makes the air dense, a kind of unseen connective tissue between the past and the present. Scents linger longer in hot weather. Everything just sort of hangs around.
Eve, whom Smollett plays with an unmistakable alertness, hangs around too, and she soaks it all in. Lemmons (who also wrote the screenplay) has a novelistic sense of childlike POV here, easily crafting the feel that Eve is experiencing all this totally but understanding it only completely.
That applies even to her flashes of the second sight, a family gift she’s starting to grow into. The closest practitioner is her beloved aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan), a bruised romantic with a string of dead husbands and a lively business doing readings for friends and neighbors; Eve takes in Mozelle’s ways as a kind of informal apprentice sprawled out on the sofa, half-listening to adult stories she doesn’t understand. When the lessons get closer to home1, that ambient quality vanishes, and Eve locks in. Still, there’s only so much she can grasp.
Eve’s Bayou has much more compassion for its child protagonist than, say, Atonement ever does. If Eve is hasty, or if she misunderstands … well, those ideas remain ifs. We wouldn’t have done any better as children, all this implies, and we might not even do better now. Lemmons has a hard-edged kindness even beyond that, constantly reminding the audience that any kind of perception is unreliable: “The truth changes color, depending on the light.”
Mozelle can see the truth for others, but she can’t see it for herself, and the one vision we know she has for her family is such a confused, terror-filled mishmash of images that it’s almost useless: on the strength of it, Eve’s mother, Roz (Lynn Whitfield), confines her three children to the house for weeks, until everyone is so bored and frustrated and paranoid that another child’s death, which may be what Mozelle glimpsed after all, comes as a kind of toxic relief.
What Roz misses in all this is what I began to worry about almost from the start, when Eve is driven away from a party to sulk because her father, community physician and heartthrob Louis (Samuel L. Jackson), always dances with her fourteen-year-old sister, ladylike Cisely (Meagan Good), and never with her. Always? I wondered. Is the danger too close in, where Mozelle can’t see it, where Roz’s protective imprisonment will only make things worse?
Lemmons isn’t interested in answering questions, though. She cares about Eve’s understanding—and, to a lesser extent, Cisely and Mozelle’s and Roz’s and Louis’s—but not her audience’s, and the growing-up process she charts here is one of realizing that sometimes the easy, definitive satisfaction never comes. Life is a text that never yields up everything, no matter how much you see.
The past is simply there, unyielding and ever-present as the humidity. Eve breathes it in and exists in it, as much as she does the present and the future. That sense, more than anything, is what makes this a necessary part of the Southern Gothic film canon.
Eve’s Bayou is streaming on Kanopy, Peacock, and YouTube TV. Thanks to C.M. Crockford for the recommendation.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
The glasses-break heard 'round the world.
Where to start with the dark comedy that's my favorite contemporary anthology show.
Streaming Shuffle
Not the movie you would expect from this header image.
Anthologized
A rare but now very relevant angle on technology and human need.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Justified, Season Six, Episode Four, “The Trash and the Snake”
“Only thing she taught me was don’t do a job for money.”
“You’re gonna want to punch him, but he’s very good.”
This is another move-things-into-position episode, but it’s so goddamned funny. I sometimes find myself thinking of, like NCIS – obviously, it’s impossible for even me to describe it as a failure given it’s entering its 24th season, but this show blows it out of the water artistically simply by picking a cool voice to speak in and doing some basic plotting. I love how this ends – with Boyd picking a new end goal, possibly too late even though it’s perfectly reasonable.
In a lot of ways, Avery is who Boyd wants to be when he grows up – intimidating, charming, his fingers in many sinister soups (to use the Monarch’s phrasing). It’s not often that I consider Justified a show that actually thematically ties together; obviously Arlo is who Raylan is afraid of becoming and Art is who he’d rather be, but Avery so clearly comes across as a kind of Shadow to Boyd that he needs to defeat to become who he wants to be.
Biggest Laugh: “It obviously hasn’t occurred to you that this pain bullshit has gotten in the way of thinking clearly.” I enjoy that there’s literally no reason for Art to be in the show beyond that Raylan loves him.
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “Murphy’s law. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.” / “You mean Occam’s Razor.” / “Occam’s Razor, Thor’s Hammer, who gives a shit.” Also, Duffy and Boyd completely indifferently standing there when the safecracker blows up.
Top Ownage: “Hey, Loretta. Do me a favour. Take a big ol’ step to your right.”
And as I recall, that’s Jake Busey as the exploding safecracker.
Foul Play – San Francisco librarian Goldie Hawn picks up a stranded motorist and is soon sucked into a plot by anti-religion extremists to assassinate the Pope. Hi-jinks, car chases, and romance with SFPD detective Chevy Chase ensue. Written and directed by Colin Higgins (who wrote Harold and Maude and whose career was cut short by AIDS), this tries to do too many things. Is it a comic tribute to Hitchcock (with some scenes clearly aping Hitch’s style and a story vaguely similar to The Man Who Knew Too Much)? It is a romantic comedy merged with a 70s conspiracy thriller? Why are we shown a mcguffin at the beginning of the movie and see it get destroyed? And what’s with the scenes involving Dudley Moore as a horny but desperate conductor? Goldie is good here, if not up to her usual standards, and there is very little chemistry between her and Chevy, who is in his first movie and who is basically playing himself (and playing the same sort of character as in Fletch but there the story is tighter). Burgess Meredith, as Goldie’s Irish-born landlord who is a secret bad-ass, steals his scenes.
Elementary, “The Eternity Injection” – A nurse Joan once worked with goes missing, and before long she’s found dead, and found to have a connection to illegal testing of a drug that can make the user’s time sense stretch out. Before long, it’s found that the drug can make the test subjects insane and that it’s all being done on the sly for the benefit of a dying millionaire (Dakin Matthews) who wants to achieve a form of immortality. Another sci-fi adjacent plot, but an intriguing one. Meanwhile, Sherlock is starting to find his support group meetings less effective, even dull, and stops going, even as he realizes this might not be the best path. As ever, I love how the show handles Sherlock’s endless struggles with his addiction.
I saw Fair Play years ago, Dudley Moore stole the movie for me but then I have no interest in seeing it again. It’s fine!
You altered the title, but as the Bard said, fair is foul and foul is fair.
Moore was actually very good in that role. I just felt like he stumbled in from another (very 1970s) movie. Though this did serve him well and help land him his starting roles in Arthur and 10. (While sort of known in the US for his British comedy work, this was his first Hollywood part.)
I saw it when it came out, and Moore really stood out, but in retrospect I don’t think that his scenes really contributed to the narrative or tone, which, outside of a few overtly slapsticky set pieces (including one with Billy Barty which i imagine is rather uncomfortable to watch today), is actually pretty good, despite a lack of chemistry among the leads.
Widow’s Bay, “Your Baggage”
Terrific episode for Patricia, as the Boogeyman’s return gives her an incredible clarity and purpose that even dealing with the island’s overall curse couldn’t: she goes from not asking for a refund for her colossally screwed-up dinner order (thanks, Kathy!) to tasing her book club non-friend because she can finally recognize that that woman is, in fact, the worst. And then there’s the quick thinking with the gasoline (I love that she has to actually go inside and order $20 on pump three) and her dedication to supervising a cremation with her newly acquired shotgun at the ready. This also plays well off the budding connection between her and Clemmons, as she’s the one who can and will warn him about making sure his child is born off the island, no matter what it takes.
The Tom-Evan subplot is less no-holds-barred awesome, but it’s still finely crafted, with some good emotional work on both sides. (The only thing that bothers me is Evan acting like it’s a huge mystery, and a semi-unique problem for him, that they never leave the island: he must know a ton of people who have never left the island! We know, specifically, that one of his friends never has either! It’s just a slight oddity in how the scene is written that he never even alludes to the supposed danger of leaving, even with some “you always say you don’t believe in all these superstitions …” caveat.) It also feels very accurately teenagerish that while Evan is initially, and fairly, bothered by his dad lying to him about his mom–though mature enough to eventually understand and accept Tom’s heartfelt explanation about it all–the concern he comes back to at the end of all this is (sympathetically) selfish. Big backstory problems are one thing; being a kid chafing at the limits of a small town is another thing, and it’s been bothering him for much longer.
You know, I probably shouldn’t have cheered at that tasing, but I did.
The shotgun bit after the Boogeyman is dead is hilarious.
Oh, there was a lot of cheering in my house at that one.
I also love how calmly and breezily she takes the shotgun down after she’s verified he’s nothing but ashes now: okay, job well done! Thanks, crematorium guy!
Much cheering!
“Because it would make me as sad as I am now.”
Threw on “The Gang Tends Bar” because I was tired; the Gang not comprehending Dennis’ demand that everyone “do their jobs” and believing this is a metaphor is some great plot unity, leading to a glorious climax once Chekhov’s anthrax rears it’s ugly head. DeVito’s cheerful explanation of how he got the tapeworm is one of his funniest deliveries in the show which is saying something. (“How, you ask?” “No, no, I didn’t-“)
World Cup, Norway vs Ivory Coast – was only planning to check out a bit of this one but it was a compelling match in the end. Ivory Coast really applied some pressure but Norway had that extra bit of quality in attack that ended up giving them the edge. Ivory Coast’s goal was the pick of the action though!
Alright! This has to be one of my favorite recent first-time watches and it brought me back to the South, to that stickiness and childhood lack of comprehension/beautiful “mishmash of images”. The mirror scene is my favorite in the movie with it’s incredible staging and Morgan’s performance.
The mirror scene somehow feels theatrical even though you couldn’t really do it in a theater, and I think it’s purely because of how beautifully staged it is: it embraces the artificiality and device and uses it to convey truth.
I’m really glad you recommended this: it had been on my to-watch list for years, but I needed the push.
I’m so glad too! The Terence Blanchard score is so lush, I might have to listen to that today.