Eve's Bayou (1997)

After a daughter witnesses her father having an affair, she begins a chain reaction that could tear her family apart.

Director:

Kasi Lemmons

Writer:

Kasi Lemmons

Stars:

Samuel L. Jackson, Jurnee Smollett, Meagan Good

12 wins & 17 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Jurnee Smollett	...	Eve Batiste
Meagan Good	...	Cisely Batiste
Lynn Whitfield	...	Roz Batiste
Samuel L. Jackson	...	Louis Batiste
Debbi Morgan	...	Mozelle Batiste Delacroix
Jake Smollett	...	Poe Batiste
Ethel Ayler	...	Gran Mere
Diahann Carroll	...	Elzora
Vondie Curtis-Hall	...	Julian Grayraven
Roger Guenveur Smith	...	Lenny Mereaux
Lisa Nicole Carson	...	Matty Mereaux
Branford Marsalis	...	Harry
Afonda Colbert	...	Henrietta
Lola Dalferes	...	Lynette
Marcus Lyle Brown	...	Hosea

Storyline

The story is set in 1962 Louisiana. The Batiste family is headed by charming doctor Louis. Though he is married to beautiful Roz, he has a weakness for attractive female patients. One night Louis trysts with married and sexy Metty Mereaux, not knowing that he is observed by his youngest daughter Eve, who is there by accident. Eve can not forget the traumatic incident and shares a secret with older sister Cisely. Lies start to roll...

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Plot Keywords:

woman | doctor | louisiana | two word title | witchcraft | 

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Taglines:

The secrets that hold us together can also tear us apart.

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Genres:

Drama

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Certificate:

14A

Did You Know?

Trivia

Meagan Good and Jurnee Smollett appeared in Roll Bounce (2005).

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Goofs

The Batiste family is happy to learn that the boy who got hit by a bus was not one of the Batiste children. When Mrs Batiste tells Eve to go upstairs and tell her sister, Cisely, that they can all go outside, a boom mic is visible at the top of the frame.

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Quotes

[first lines]
Narrator: Memory is a selection of images, some elusive, others imprinted indelibly on the brain. The summer I killed my father I was 10 years old. My brother Poe was 9, and my sister Cisely has just turned 14.
Narrator: The town we lived in was named after a slave. It was said that when General John Paul Batiste was stricken with cholera, his life was saved by the powerful medicine of an African slave woman called Eve. In return for his life, he freed her, and gave her this piece of land by the Bayou....

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Connections

Spin-off Dr. Hugo (1996)

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Soundtracks

Sit Down Sunshine
Written by Buddy Scott & Jimmy Radcliffe
Published by Universal Music Publishing
Performed by Jimmy Radcliffe
Licensed courtesy of Chris Radcliffe

User Reviews

Witchcraft and the modern Southern girl

A bayou is the Southern U S term for an ox-bow lake, a stretch of stagnant water left behind by a river running through level countryside after it has made a short cut through one of its banks. The characters in this film have been left behind by history in the Bayou country of Louisiana. They are nice, middle-class creole folk going nowhere. Louis Baptiste (Samuel L Jackson) is the local doctor living in a fine frame house with his fragile ex-beauty queen wife and three children including the film's narrator, 10 year old Eve (Jurnee Smollett). Family legend has it that an earlier Baptiste, a French general in the Napoleonic era, had his life saved by a local black slave girl, the ancestral Eve. She married him and had 16 children, thus kick-starting local development. By the early 1960s, in which this movie is set, the Bayou is your archetypal Southern backwater. Louis didn't get that bit at medical school about not screwing your patients and in fact it seems to be an integral part of his practice. His sister Mozelle (Debbie Morgan) is also a therapist of a sort - having the gift (or curse) of second sight she finds lost relatives by exercising her psychic powers. Unfortunately she's hopeless as to her own affairs- her three husbands, all much loved, have all died prematurely.

At the start of the film Eve, in voice over mode, announces " The year I killed my father, I was 10." Then we switch to a party at the Baptise house where Eve discovers her Dad having it off with a patient in the carriage house. He laughs it off, but the seed of doubt is planted, and when there is an incident involving Louis and Eve's older sister Cisely (Meagan Good) the stage is set for tragedy. In fact the movie is not so much about murder as about guilt, the especially keen variety which afflicts someone who injures another he or she adores and is dependent on.

On the way, as the film moves through lush swampy scenery at an appropriately languid pace, we meet the rest of the Baptiste family and Diahann Carroll, enjoying herself as a downmarket sorceress. There's no sign of the racially conscious South - as far as race is concerned we might as well be in the highlands of Scotland. The whole film has a dreamlike quality (Brigadoon?). As Eve explains, her story is about the way memory is formed often as much by imagination as by what actually happened. I seem to remember they told us that in Psych 101 but it is rather more poetically put on this occasion.

The photography is gorgeous and the acting more than proficient. Jurnee Smollett in her first role stands out, but Debbie Morgan as Mozelle the psychic aunt produces a three dimensional character from a part which could easily have been done as caraciature. Samuel L Jackson fills the bill as the charming philanderer Louis.

The film is apparently the first from writer-director Kasi Lemmons, though Samuel L is credited as one of the producers and very likely had a say in the production. Maybe it wasn't such a great idea to introduce all the main characters in such a rush at the party in the opening sequence but it's all sorted out in the end. The brief black and white "psychic" sequences fit seamlessly into the rest of the film and somehow one doesn't stop to ask just how Mozelle does it.

At the end of the day, you wonder how a child of 10 could go through what Eve has gone through and not become a gibbering wreck. At the end, she sits on the edge of the Bayou with sister Cisely, contemplating a gorgeous sunset, apparently at peace with the world. Is the atmosphere so thick, so cloying, in the Bayou, that even murder and mayhem are quickly forgotten? It's a beautiful sensuous (and sensual) atmosphere though, and worth sampling.

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

7 November 1997 (USA)

Also Known As:

Amores Divididos

Filming Locations:

Otis House, Fairview Riverside State Park - 119 Fairview Drive, Madisonville, Louisiana, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$6,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend USA:

$3,287,846, 9 November 1997

Gross USA:

$14,842,388

Cumulative Worldwide Gross:

$14,842,388

Company Credits

Production Co:

Trimark Pictures, ChubbCo Film, Addis Wechsler Pictures

Technical Specs

Runtime:

109 min

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital SDDS

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1