BEFORE: I can't remember exactly when, but there was a special screening of this film at the theater where I work, maybe a year ago or a bit longer. Some of the stars held a Q&A panel after, though I really didn't pay too much attention since I hadn't ever seen the film. However, it did put the film on my radar and therefore my watchlist - I figured I'd get around to it eventually, and today's the day. It's been bouncing around on different streaming services, but I'm going to catch up to it thanks to the Peacock app. I tried Roku first, but it's already left that one.
Roger Guenveur Smith carries over again from "Deep Cover" and Samuel L. Jackson's here one more time, so now he'll be tied with Liam Neeson for the most appearances so far this year.
THE PLOT: What did little Eve see - and how will it haunt her? Husband, father and womanizer, Louis Batiste is the head of an affluent family, but it's the women who rule this gothic world of secrets, lies and mystic forces.
AFTER: Yeah, I don't think I'm in any of the target audiences for this film - I probably would have gone on never seeing this film and being pretty OK with that, if I hadn't sat in on that panel with the actors from the film talking about it, some 26 or 27 years later. It's about a prominent black family in Louisiana, and that's not really my world, not even the family part, since I don't have any kids. The father is a doctor, and his sister (the kids' aunt) has the gift of being able to read people's futures, but not in a voodoo kind of way - although there is some voodoo stuff in the latter part of the film. Family life, not my thing, Louisiana, not my thing (though I've been to New Orleans once) and voodoo, DEFINITELY not my thing.
There's plenty of family dysfunction, though - after a party at their house, young Eve Batiste falls asleep in the carriage house and wakes up to see her father having sex with a family friend, Matty Meraux. He stops when he realizes his daughter is watching, and he puts young Eve to bed. Later Eve tells her sister, Cisely, what she saw, but Cisely explains it away and tells Eve that she didn't see what she thought she saw.
But over the next few months, Eve sees more signs of her father's infidelity when she goes with him to visit patients, and when the patients ask for the "special" medication treatments, he sends his daughter to play outside. Hmm-hmm. Meanwhile Cisely reaches the age of puberty and becomes more sullen and withdrawn, while Eve's mother, Roz, slowly starts to suspect that her husband is not being faithful. Aunt Mozelle, whose third husband died shortly after that party, has a dream about a kid getting hit by a vehicle, so just to be on the safe side, Roz won't let any of her three kids leave the house, for fear of Mozelle's dream coming true.
While Roz and Mozelle are out at the market, they visit another fortune-teller, as people do, I guess, and they test out her abilities. Elzora can sense Roz's marital trouble, but tells her that in three years a solution to her problems will arise, and in the meantime she needs to "look to her children", which Roz takes as a sign that keeping them cooped up inside and basically smothering them is the right track to be on. Elzora tells Mozelle, though, that she is cursed and that the next man she marries will also die tragically. This isn't really much of a grand leap in fortune-telling to me, as everyone will die at some point, and most likely it will be regarded as tragic, at least by someone's point of view. Predicting that at some point some kid in town will be hit by a car or train is another really easy prediction to make, I mean it's the 1960s and most intersections don't even have stoplights, and kids are likely to run around in the street and not look where they're going.
Things come to a head, though, when Cisely confides in Eve the reason that she's been so moody and sullen, and it's not just because she's a teenager. It seems that one night, after her parents were fighting (probably over his infidelity), Cisely went to comfort her father, and he was drunk and tried to molest her. This leads Eve to want to kill her own father for hurting her sister, and she chooses to try the voodoo thing by visiting Elzora herself. While Eve was expecting to be given a voodoo doll, apparently that's not the way it works, and Elzora only needed a sample of his hair to cast a curse on him. Again, it's very easy to say that you've cast a curse on someone, and then when something bad inevitably happens to them, you can just point to that and say that the curse is working.
Eve hedges her bets and helps to seal her father's fate by speaking to Lenny Mereaux, the husband of the woman her father is sleeping with on the regular, and Lenny's got a teaching job that keeps him traveling, which may have led to her infidelity in the first place, it's tough to say though. But Eve points out that both her father and Lenny's wife don't like to be alone, and suggests that maybe they're both out at night at the same time, and Lenny starts to figure this one out. He finds Eve's father and his wife Matty together at a bar one night, and after he pulls his wife away, threatens Eve's father with a gun.
Later Eve finds a letter that her father wrote to Mozelle, disputing the accusation that he molested his daughter. His version of the event is quite different than Cisely's, but unfortunately we in the audience can't be sure whose account is more accurate. Yeah, that's a problem because we don't know whether he's a daughter-raper in addition to being a cheating husband. I guess maybe they're both bad, but one is so much worse than the other. I mean, he enjoyed a certain amount of local attention as an African-American doctor, and he seemed to have his pick of women around town, that to me suggests he didn't need to molest his own daughter, unless he was just completely out of control. But I suppose it's best left ambiguous here, and then each viewer can decide for themselves if he deserved his terrible fate.
BTW, it's pretty naive to think that only ONE kid could be hit by a vehicle in a particular city over a particular summer. There could be two or more, so just because another kid got hit by a truck, that does NOT mean the same thing won't happen to one of the Baptiste children. Take it from someone who gets a message on his phone every time someone gets hit by an L train on the NYC subway line. It seems to happen a lot, and that's just on ONE line - is there someone in Brooklyn actively throwing people off the platforms and on to the tracks?
Directed by Kasi Lemmons (director of "Harriet")
Also starring Jurnee Smollett (last seen in "The Burial"), Debbi Morgan (last seen in "Coach Carter"), Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Deep Blue Sea"), Lynn Whitfield (last seen in "Head of State"), Diahann Carroll (last seen in "Sammy Davis, Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), Lisa Nicole Carson (last seen in "Devil in a Blue Dress"), Meagan Good (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Vondie Curtis-Hall (last seen in "The Night House"), Branford Marsalis, Carol Sutton (last seen in "Love, Wedding, Marriage"), Ethel Ayler (last seen in "The Bodyguard"), Jake Smollett, Victoria Rowell (last seen in "Dumb and Dumber"), Afonda Colbert, Lola Dalferes, Marcus Lyle Brown (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Alverta Perkins Dunigan, Sharon K. London (last seen in "Bill & Ted Face the Music"), Leonard L. Thomas (also last seen in "Coach Carter"), Allen Toussaint, Billie Neal (last seen in "A Kiss Before Dying"), with the voice of Tamara Tunie (last seen in "The Peacemaker").
RATING: 4 out of 10 pins stuck in a toy monkey's face
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