Word: bayou
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Like most memorable cinematic upscales, Eve's Bayou finds itself in a precariously balanced world, cascading between realism and mystical fantasy. From the beginning of this journey in which the waters of the bayou reflect and destory the surrounding images nothing is quite what appears...
Even the beginning, in which Eve Batiste claims "The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old," seems to indicate that Eve's Bayou will follow the tired trail of Southern Gothic. Yet like all memories, the narrator's claims may not contain the absolute truth...
...father is Louis Batiste (Samuel L. Jackson, who also produced the film), a moderately successful colored doctor releated to the isolated Louisiana bayou. It is the who must die, yet to view the story in the context of the inevitable death does an injustice to the film. There are larger forces at work and greater issues that elevate the film above the presupposed tragedy...
...fact, Eve's Bayou is not about him, but of the women in his family. His wife Roz (Lynn Whitfield), fearful of her husband's infidelity, holds the Batiste family under a tight watch. She overpowers her daughters, Cisely (Meagan Good) and Eve (Jurnee Smollett), although the strength of her convictions may not be entirely rational. His sister Mozelle (Debbi Morgan), the emotional center of the family, is a healer of a different sort. While Louis safely inhabits the bounds of modern society, Mozelle is a clairvoyant who secretly tends to others through voodoo. She can sense others' secrets through...
Rauschenberg was a Texas boy, two parts Anglo, one part German, one part Cherokee. He was born in 1925 in one of the most art-free zones of America, Port Arthur, a bayou oil-refinery town on the Gulf of Mexico. His parents were Fundamentalist Christians, and as a teenager he thought of becoming a preacher. Luckily for American art, and perhaps for the ministry too, he ditched the notion on realizing that the Church of Christ forbade dancing. He did a stint in the Navy, as a male psychiatric nurse--which confirmed him as a lifelong pacifist. He dabbled...