In the Flesh: Eve's Bayou (Patreon)

Where does pain come from? Can you run your hand over the shape of it until you leave behind the silted delta of memory and come to the clear water of its source? In Kasi Lemmons’ 1997 drama Eve’s Bayou, an ambiguous moment of broken boundaries between father and daughter rips its way through a well-to-do Louisiana family and their community. Adoring daughter Cisely (Meagan Good) tells one story. Debonair, serially unfaithful father Louis (Samuel L. Jackson) tells another. Lemmons’ film, though, is concerned with nothing so prosaic as “the truth”. Instead it follows its subjects with grace and humanity, neither shying away from their ugliness nor eliding their finer qualities. The truth of what happened is a thing which cannot exist, a place trapped between the contradictory palaces of memory in which its echoes live on. This is the reality ten-year-old protagonist Eve (Jurnee Smollett) and Cisely, her older sister, face as the film ends — a thing as deep and dark and fundamentally unknowable as the bayou named for their half-mythical ancestor, the titular Eve.

Lemmons’ script is easy and naturalistic, and the core cast — particularly Smollett and Jackson — are so charismatic that the film’s moments of weaker lighting and visually stiff indoor shots are easy to overlook. Even the handful of psychic visions woven throughout Eve’s Bayou feel of a piece with the fictional world around them, neither over-dramatic nor lacking in consequence. Black and white shots of bodies twisting in the lens of an ethereal third eye prove eerily hypnotic. A heroin addict coils around his paraphernalia like a wounded animal retreating into its den. Lovers rub their bodies slow and gentle against one another, shadows caressing their skin as the sound of their breath hisses faintly in the background. And yet even psychic power is just another way of seeing, and subject to all the limits which plague human experience and keep all consciousnesses fundamentally separate from one another.

The moment in which Eve realizes her gift of sight cannot unravel the mystery of her sister’s suffering, that even her sister can’t really remember what occurred, puts a nail in certainty’s coffin. Magic is powerless before something as simple as the truth of what happened between two people in a dark room. There are golden afternoons, children running and playing along the bank of the dark water, a cornucopia of fruit lying fresh and succulent in the stalls of an open air market, and there is love, and anger, and cruelty. All of it drifts disconnected through a haze of shared experience, together but apart, touched and smelled and seen but never understood.