ABSTRACT
Kasi Lemmons's film Eve's Bayou occupies this divide between private reminiscence and public recollection. Eve's father, Louis, is the town's physician. He is a handsome but reckless man who spurns his beautiful wife only to parade his affairs with married women under her nose. Eve's mother can offer little comfort and instead seeks her own consolation in her adoring relationship with Eve's younger brother, Poe. Eve retreats to the barn where she falls into a fitful sleep, only to be awakened by the sight of her father making love with Matty Mereaux. Eve's desire for revenge leads her to a conjuring woman, Elzora, from whom she wishes to purchase a spell to use against her father. Eve's Bayou remains a very sophisticated meditation on the nature of memory—and its disturbances. The controversies over repressed memory and childhood sexual abuse remain contested sites of theory and clinical practice.
