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Eve's Bayou
**1/2
Cinema
Releases - August 14,
1998
Rated on a 4-star
scale; USA; Written and directed by Kasi Lemmons.
Starring Jurnee Smollett, Meagan Good, Samuel
L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, Jake Smollett, Ethel Ayler, Diahann
Carroll, Vondie Curtis Hall.
"Memory is a selection of images... some elusive,
others printed indelibly on the brain. The summer I killed my father, I was
ten years old."
These electrifyingly intriguing words begin
"Eve's Bayou", and promise us a delve into the secrets of the
past.
Eve, as she continues to tell us on her own
voice-over, is one of the descendants of a rich Southern landowner, Jean-Paul
Batiste, and his beloved slave-girl, also named Eve. Her father Louis (Samuel
L. Jackson) is known as "The best colored doctor in the South", but also
as a womaniser, and Eve's mother Roz (Lynn Whitfield) is losing her patience.
Her sister Cisely (Meagan Good), who is going through adolescence, also seems
to be behaving moodily.
The performance by Jurnee Smollett, who plays
the 10-year old Eve, is quite stunning. Her wide eyes instantly draw the
audience in, and she gives Eve a sharp tongue. Samuel L. Jackson is as wonderful
as ever, in one of his most mature performances. Roger Guenveur Smith does
a good job of portraying an angry, jealous husband.
The filmmaking here is also very good. Amy Vincent's
dark, haunting cinematography sets a strange, mystical mood. Terilyn Shropshire
does his best with his editing to make the film seem like the quest through
the memory that the opening words promise.
Most of the writing is absorbing, and director
Kasi Lemmons handles her drama well. Yet the film still goes wrong, and is
one of the biggest disappointments of the year. Many of its scenes are
anti-climaxes, starting off with either some beautiful dialogue or interesting
technique, but wandering off into muddled mess. Two key scenes do
this, which are Eve's aunt telling her the secret about her favourite husband,
and the climax of the film, which explains the circumstances of Eve killing
her father. In the former, it is obvious where the scene is leading up to
halfway through, and what needs filling in is the significance -- yet Lemmons
expects the event itself to be enough of a surprise, and ends the scene as
soon as our suspicions are confirmed. In the latter, what should be a blinding
revelation is revealed scenes beforehand, and Lemmons still does not give
us a point, again expecting the events to be enough. Movies have given us
their endings previous to their beginnings before -- think "Chariots of Fire",
"The English Patient" and "Titanic", as well as the recent "Ice Storm" and
"TwentyFourSeven". But all those movies knew where they were going, had a
point, and in their finale repeated their meaningless opening images as images
filled with poignancy. "Eve's Bayou" does it the other way round, starting
with fascinating images and ending with the same ones being simply infuriating.
We haven't really moved on.
Most infuriating is the new context of the opening
line: "Memory is a selection of images... some elusive, others printed indelibly
on the brain." It seems to me that Lemmons is simply hiding behind her opening
line, telling us that her film was trying to reinvent story structure, be
only a journey through the mind, it was supposed to be ambiguous.
Eve is still playing things through her head, we can't work out the point
because she can't. Well, excuse me, but firstly, Lemmons' style was never
effective enough to seem like only a journey through the mind. Atom
Egoyan's "Sweet Hereafter" worked as that, but that kind of miraculous style
is not something a filmmaker can plan for at the script level. Secondly,
Eve can put her bloody thoughts onscreen when she has figured out a point
-- otherwise, I'm not interested. It doesn't even need to be one that can
be summed up in words, it should be an emotional resolution, like in "Sweet
Hereafter". The film seems unfinished rather than ambiguous, as if Lemmons
was too tired to deal with the complications of her story, copped out, and
stuck this excuse onto the end. Its themes should not be blurred, but should
be more like the one which contains a strange mystery about a
kiss.
Lemmons has talent, and hopefully she will use
it properly in future, making pictures that follow through. "Eve's Bayou",
however, sucked me in and turned out to be a con. It is a film of such damning
emotional trickery that we should change the phrase "Leading them up the
garden path" to "Leading them up Eve's bayou".
COPYRIGHT©
1998 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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