In young Eve's life, things seem to be going quite smoothly. She lives with her prosperous parents, Roz (Lynn Whitfield) and beloved doctor Louis (Samuel L. Jackson), and her two siblings, Poe (Jake Smollett) and Cisely (Meagan Good), in a lovely home. Their days of engaging in splendid parties against a backdrop of glorious foliage makes their lives seem like something out of a postcard. But it turns out this tranquil existence is as fragile as a house of cards. A gust of wind comes to blow it down in the form of Louis proceeding to cheat on Roz with another woman. Louis sneakily engages in this infidelity during a party, not realizing that Eve is secretly watching from afar.
Subsequently, Eve is distraught and the family begins to suffer all kinds of struggles. Eve confides in Cisely about their father's infidelity only for Cisely to insist to her sister that she didn't see what she actually saw. Meanwhile, Roz is giving a premonition of the future involving one of her children dying at the hands of bus and forces her three kids to stay indoors. Finally, there is Aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan), a go-to source of advice for Eve who just lost her most recent husband. Eve's lost a lot of lovers over the years and is beginning to fear she is cursed to always have her lovers suffer some sort of grisly fate.
Her worries about this part of her life are at the center of the very best scene of Eve's Bayou. Aunt Mozelle tells Eve a story about when she was married and having an affair. This eventually resulted in her secret lover coming over to her husbands' house and threatening that man with a gun in the name of finally uniting with Mozelle. In the present, Mozelle tells this story while facing a mirror, with figures representing her two lovers appearing in the mirror and acting out parts of her anecdote. Eventually, Mozelle, while being framed by the reflection, moves into the back of the room and finishes her story caught between the two men who loved her. Eve's Bayou's central theme of the past intersecting with the present becomes personified in this sequence.
This whole scene also represents a magnificently creative way of having Mozelle telling a story to young Eve. There's so much clear thought that's gone into this sequence, from the restrained camerawork that captures things in a limited amount of shots to the timing on when Mozelle goes from being a narrator to also becoming a participant in her own tale. Overall, Eve's Bayou is a great film but it especially excels with the character of Aunt Mozelle. Writer/director Kasi Lemmons realizes Mozelle's internal worries over her past, present, and future so vividly even beyond just this standout scene. A later nighttime sequence where Mozelle's dialogue is accompanied by a shot of her trio of deceased husbands standing in a pool of fog proves Lemmons can work wonders with the character of Aunt Mozelle throughout the entire movie.
Shots involving Mozelle's present becoming littered with physical representations of her past are a key example of the creative visual ways Lemmons fuses the past and the present throughout Eve's Bayou. Another great example of this trait is an earlier scene involving Cisely explaining to Eve what she actually saw instead of her Dad cheating on their Mom. Cisely and an inquisitive Eve watch from afar as a recreation of Cisely's fictionalized tale plays out. Through giving us a visual representation of Cisely's story, one that occupies the same location and employs the same people as Eve's actual encounter, we can see how Cisely's story is playing out inside Eve's head. Her actual memories are becoming intertwined with Cisely's inaccurate recounting. This isn't just a well-shot and well-staged scene, it also has an incredible amount of layers to it!
Speaking of multi-layered, that's a perfect term for the performance Lemmons draws out of her cast. I especially love how she uses Samuel L. Jackson in the role of Louis. When we first meet Louis, he's a spry and jolly soul, a man who seems to have everything in control. It's the kind of role Jackson can sell so easily thanks to the cool sense of confidence he's brought to so many of his action film performances. However, both Eve and the viewer quickly learn that Louis is a more complicated man than the figure we initially see dancing at the party. Jackson makes it believable that Louis could be somebody that charms the pants off anybody near him.
However, he's also able to unearth and beautifully handle more complex layers of this role, particularly in depicting Louis navigating interactions with Eve after she catches her Dad cheating on Mom. There's so much to unpack in their conversations together, particularly in how Jackson subtly conveys Louis realizing that, no matter how much he wants to just forget Eve ever saw him cheating on his wife, nothing will ever be the same again. It's a performance that serves as another aspect of Eve's Bayou reflecting the incredible amount of detail its writer & director (Kasi Lemmons) has packed into her feature film directorial debut.
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