Review of Eve's Bayou (1997) by S E — 12 Sep 2008

Eve's Bayou is one of the better films I have seen in quite some time. In its unusual mixture of childhood memories, trauma, and even magic it is one the few films to remind me of Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece Fanny and Alexander. Though not quite as richly textured as the Bergman film (though not much it is), it is also able to tell an essentially melodramatic story without ever coming across as emotionally manipulative like most melodramas. Indeed, what is reveled in the filmâ??adultery, incest, and "murder"â??would come across as silly in a lesser film, but Eve's Bayou makes it all believable.

In terms of its style alone, the film is often very stunning. It is beautifully photographed, and the cast is uniformly excellent. Indeed, it is easy to forget that Samuel Jackson, who plays the charming womanizing doctor, can actually be an excellent actor rather than a clichéd action hero fighting snakes on a plane. In addition, the young actress who plays Eve (Jurnee Smollett) gives one of the better performances by a child in a movie in recent years. Her opening narration, surely one of the better lines to start a film, is "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." The film tries to live up to the poetic potential of this lineâ??the elusiveness of memory in other wordsâ?? but is not quite able to. But its relative failure means that it is so much more ambitious than most films.