Southern Gothic Cinema: Eve’s Bayou

Eve’s Bayou (1997)

Writer/Director: Kasi Lemmons

Starring: Jurnee Smollett, Meagan Good, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan, Samuel L. Jackson, and Diahann Carroll

“Memory is a selection of images, some elusive, others printed indelibly on the brain. The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old.”

These are the cryptic words of an adult Eve Batiste, recounting the long, hot summer in which everything changed.

In the 1960s, in the small Louisiana town that is her namesake, she learns about family secrets, keeping up appearances, and the elusive nature of truth. The threads of her affluent existence unravel under the weight of her father’s continuous infidelity and the inevitable consequences.

The film is steeped in magical realism and Creole folklore, and both hoodoo and Louisiana voodoo are represented, albeit imperfectly. Eve shares the gift of the “the sight” with her aunt Mozelle, who is a clairvoyant rootworker and seeks out voodoo priestess Elzora to exact revenge on her father, based on what could be a lie.

As much as Eve’s Bayou is about death, betrayal, tragedy and trauma, it’s also about sisterhood and the ties that bind. At the film’s very core, it’s about the innate magic of women.