Eve’s Bayou

Eve’s Bayou (1997) is a gothic African American melodrama set in the bayous of Louisiana. Because I am not particularly familiar with that area, it is difficult for me to assess the realism of the film. It does have a certain Hallmark Hall of Fame sweetness, and at times this was an irritation. Most of the characters wear freshly starched and new clothes, and if there is poverty in the area, we never see it. All the characters are of a racially mixed heritage, though they live as African Americans, descended from the union of a former slave named Eve and a white landowner. The film makes this heritage clear through voiceover narration and through scenes showing characters of varying skin tones. The implications of the heritage do not have much importance in the film, other than to suggest that we are all racially intertwined.

This film has too many subjects and themes. It is about a marriage in crisis, the conflict between folk magic and modern medicine, folk magic and reason, a coming of age story for two young sisters, a rivalry between a brother and sister, adultery, possible incest, jealousy, guilt, and so on. The closing voiceover narration insists as well that the film is about the nature of truth, which changes according to the weather. This is a point the film makes very well through scenes in which characters think they see one thing but are later convinced they actually saw something else. The film doesn’t need the voiceover narration to insist on this theme or that the film is about the nature of memory. All of this is clear enough.

Gothicism abounds in this film, but it is mainly a matter of mood more than anything else. (In the distant past is the relationship between the original Eve and the plantation owner Monsieur Batiste, but the film doesn’t effectively establish this as an element that has some influence on the modern world, and it doesn’t suggest that this relationship is a primal horror to which all must react—so to call it Gothic doesn’t make sense). One of the adults in the film, Mozelle (Debbi Morgan) is a kind of seer. She describes herself as a counselor, but her clients come to her for spiritual and psychic readings. Every now and then she works a bit of magic. She believes she is cursed—all three of her husbands suffered premature deaths, and another conjure woman, a fortuneteller named Elzora smoothly played by Diahnn Carroll, tells her that she is cursed, and whether this is true or not she believes it. Her brother is a medical doctor, Louis Batiste (Samuel Jackson), the father of two daughters and a son.

The film is at its best when it focuses on the children and their perceptions of the adult world. The film tells its story from the viewpoint of Eve, the younger daughter, who has some of the same conjuring instincts as her aunt. She is a mischievous child who plays tricks on her siblings and who plays a more serious and ominous trick later in the film. She sees—literally envisions--the world through her own eyes as well as through the eyes of the adults who tell her their stories. In her mind the conflicting worlds of fantasy and reality, of magic and medicine, reality and imagination, come together in confusion and conflict. When Mozelle tells her stories, Eve imagines them so vividly that the characters of the story seem to act out events before her. In these scenes the film really comes to life.

The film’s real concern is with how the daughters learn about and become involved in the adult world. One of them has her first period. The other accidentally sees their father having sex with a woman other than their mother. Both hear their parents arguing loudly at night, and they react in various ways to the tensions of the house and marriage. We saw a similar tension in To Kill a Mockingbird, which shows the adult world through the eyes of the girl Scout and her brother. Their acquisition of adult knowledge comes mostly through the trial of a black man accused of raping a white girl. In Eve’s Bayou, adult knowledge comes through too many doors and windows—from the psychic aunt, their mother’s anguish over their father’s philandering, from general domestic discord, and from a strange sexual tension between the father and the older daughter. It is not enough that this film is about girls on the verge of adulthood, on the verge of losing their innocence and their faith in the world—it all must be complicated with an array of melodramatic twists and turns. In the end the film has to insist on its concern with how we always act out our heritage in one way or the other, with the nature of truth, with guilt and redemption—with the necessity of having to live with what we have made of our lives. It has to do this, I think, because the film over-complicates everything. Although the film has all the material elements needed for a detailed exploration of what it means to live out one’s heritage, these are never tied coherently together, and instead what we have is a melodrama.

The concern with magic and reason—with the brother Louis who is a doctor and the sister Mozelle who has conjuring abilities—gives the film much interest above and beyond the concern with the children. Yet this dimension is more a matter of spectacle, of sensation, than of substance. Nothing in the film truly hinges on magic. The film shows people talking about and trying to perform magic, but it doesn’t insist that magic and voodoo are real, only that people believe in them. When Eve decides she wants to kill her father, whom she believes tried to have incestuous relations with her older sister Cisely, she at first tries to do so by paying the fortuneteller Elzora to concoct a spell and by sticking pins in a doll. But she also tries to provoke jealousy in the husband of a woman with whom her father had an affair, as if to ensure that by relying on both magic and adult emotions that she will be able to achieve her goal.

The film shows us the undercurrent of belief in magic and voodoo among the people in the film without making this a film about these subjects. Instead they contribute to the general plot of daughters reacting to the circumstances in which they find themselves—their parent’s difficult marriage, their aunt’s belief that she is cursed, and the problems of the adult world which she tries to cure.

The acting in the film is more sincere and eager than it is good. The younger daughter, Eve (Jurnee Smollett), is earnest and entirely likeable, though she and many others in the film seem often to be going through scripted motions rather than acting. The film is genuinely entertaining and, finally, moving in those moments when the two girls become aware of the mistakes they have made and the consequences that have led to. What the unlikely and overwrought plot cannot achieve, the characters and their interactions make up for.

The addition of an incest element to the film seems gratuitous, especially since the film seems to back off from the theme after introducing it by suggesting that neither individual involved in the purported act of attempted incest is sure what happened or why. Apparently both bear some blame, and are to be absolved of blame by their loss of self-control, by their uncertainty as to what really happened, by their doubt that anything happened at all. The film wants to suggest incest as a reality in the world it portrays but is unwilling to engage the issue. We can extend this complaint to the film as a whole. Despite the grim and dark events that occur, despite the death of Louis Batiste, perhaps as the result of a partial misunderstanding by the two daughters, perhaps as a result of Eve’s plotting, despite the film’s strong argument that adulthood is a grim matrix of darkness and responsibility, the film comes to a strange sort of happy ending. Eve learns to live with what she has done. Cisely recovers from her depression. Even Mozelle gets another husband, though whether he falls victim to the curse we never know.

Although every major and minor character is at least partially African American in Eve’s Bayou (no white characters appear), and although the film takes place in the context of a social milieu in which every character is the product of a heritage of interplay between blacks and whites, it is not a film that engages racial issues. Rather it works in the individual realms of the individual characters. Those aspects of their lives that might have racial significance—interest in voodoo, dialect, varied skin tones—are mainly incidental. The characters of Eve’s Bayou confront issues and challenges more fundamentally drawn from the general human condition.