Eve’s Bayou
Their father regarded within the community as “the best coloured doctor in all of Louisiana,” growing up with a beautiful and loving mother and two siblings, older sister Cisely and younger brother Poe, all together in a house with four bathrooms in an area known as Eve’s Bayou, it would seem from the outside that the lives of precocious Shakespeare-quoting ten year old Eve Batiste and her family was prosperous and happy, but appearances are not all.
Her aunt Mozelle Batiste Delacroix regarding herself as a “psychic counsellor,” helping others find things which are lost and moving on when they are irreplaceable, her life has been one of tragedy, three times a widow, and Eve stumbles on other truths closer to home, that her father is not the husband that he should be, that some of the home visits to his patients are not to treat their ailments.
A former actor who appeared in The Silence of the Lambs and Candyman, Eve’s Bayou was the feature debut of writer and director Kasi Lemmons, set in a Creole-American community in the 1960s, an enclave of the black community where lives are safely lived without being policed by white folk or subjected to endemic racism, reflecting Lemmons own childhood experience before moving out of Missouri at eight years old.
Originally released in 1997 and revisited as part of the Criterion Collection in the runup to the release of Lemmons’ forthcoming Whitney Houston biopic, Eve’s Bayou is told through the experiences of Birds of Prey’s Jurnee Smollett, named for the freed slave who was her ancestor who also gave her name to the area, with Lynn Whitfield as mother Roz, Debbi Morgan as aunt Mozelle, Samuel L Jackson as father Louis, Meagan Good as Cisely and Smollett’s own brother Jake as Poe.
A slow-paced film for a slow-paced but colourful world, the passage of time unclear, almost abstract, Eve’s awakening to the unhappy truths of the world and the desire to take action bring her to Elzora, a practitioner of voodoo played by the great Diahann Carroll as though she were from another world impinging on this sedate retreat where the woman burn for reasons other than the southern heat and curses are inevitably double-edged.
Criterion’s new edition of Eve’s Bayou containing both the 109-minute theatrical and the 115-minute director’s cut, restored in 4K, supporting material includes a virtual cast reunion and an interview with Lemmons, both recorded in 2022, an audio commentary and Lemmons’ short film Dr Hugo which acted as a “proof of concept” for the feature, telling the story of Vondie Curtis-Hall’s philandering physician in a somewhat different style.
Eve’s Bayou is available on Blu-ray from Criterion now
