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| Images courtesy of Trimark Pictures |
Often father and daughter look down on mother together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.
—Bonnie Burstow
One of the most painful journeys on the road to adulthood is the recontextualization of childhood memories. What was once innocent and magical becomes tainted, and often, people we held in high regard, including our parents, are exposed to be not infallible gods but only humans. Memories are inherently compromised by the passage of time, the details slowly fading away until all that is left is the emotional state. Eve's Bayou (1997) is not only a tribute to the instability of childhood but also an exploration of the secrets that families keep to hold themselves together.
The film swirls around the Batiste family, who live in the bayou of Louisiana. The patriarch, Louis (Samuel L. Jackson), is a local doctor who resides in a large house with his wife Roz (Lynn Whitfield) and their three children: Cisely (Meagan Good), Eve (Jurnee Smollett), and Poe (Jake Smollett). On the surface, it seems like the family is loving and successful, but in the fringes and the dark corners, there are secrets, especially concerning what Louis does while out on his rounds as a physician.
Eve is the main character the narrative focuses on as she tries to navigate her coming-of-age and her parent's deteriorating marriage. One of the central thematic underpinnings is how she feels ignored as the middle child, only gaining attention when she is acting out. Her older sister, Cisely, is at the juncture between childhood and adulthood and tries to put on airs that she has her life together, but she too struggles with her place in the family.
Even at this young age, both girls are participating in the game of competition that women sometimes have to gain male attention, in this case, vying for their father's affection. There is a saying: "A girl's first hater is her mother", and as Cisely blossoms into a young woman, her mother harbors jealousy at her close relationship with Louis, partly because his philandering ways have created a wall between them that she cannot seem to climb.
At the edges of the family drama, there are hints of magical realism and spirituality. Eve's aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan) is a Hoodoo practitioner who sells her services as a seer, and her visions and ability to see into someone's heart are always accurate. Eve also possesses these powers, though much weaker, and she doesn't always know how to interpret her dreams and premonitions due to her lack of life experience. It is heavily implied that these powers come at a personal cost, that in exchange for these abilities, whoever has them may be cursed in some way.
For Mozelle, it manifests itself as an inability to keep a husband alive, and subsequently, she has been married three times as a result. There could be a parallel between the concept of being "cursed" and the onset of menstruation, which used to be referred to as "the curse." Some say that there are magick spells that revolve around using period blood, such as mixing it into a person's food that you want to fall in love with you. On a base level, the onset of the menses indicates that a young woman has become fertile and that change alone dictates the way she is treated by society.
Visually, Eve's Bayou is sumptuously imagined, taking advantage of the lush and humid environments of the swamps to enhance the Southern Gothic atmosphere. Mirrors play a large part in the visual language, often used in creative ways to depict flashback sequences. In one sequence, when Eve is traumatized by seeing her father with someone other than her mother, her older sister tries to comfort her (and herself) by "accompanying" Eve to her memory and essentially rewriting what Eve saw into a less incriminating story. Recollection is sometimes a defense mechanism.
As the film fades into a sunset, adult Eve ponders the concept of memories and leaves the audience with this thought:
"Like others before me, I have the gift of sight. But the truth changes color depending on the light. And tomorrow can be clearer than yesterday. Memory is the selection of images, some elusive, others printed indelibly on the brain. Each image is like a thread, each thread woven together to make a tapestry of intricate texture. And the tapestry tells a story, and the story is our past."
--Michelle Kisner