`EVE'S BAYOU' A CAPTIVATING TALE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

A distinctive and winning directorial debut from actress Kasi Lemmons (``Silence of the Lambs''), ``Eve's Bayou'' is a slightly magical tale set in a very persuasive, particular time and place.

Many, in fact, may consider the movie's easygoing but demon-haunted world a never-Neverland: a prosperous Louisiana community occupied solely by African-Americans, circa 1960. But much more successfully than Steven Spielberg did with a similar milieu in ``The Color Purple,'' Lemmons gives her Deep South Eden the breath of real life while animating it with a mystic/mythical lifeblood.

Told from the perspective of 10-year-old Eve Batiste (the remarkably versatile and capable Jurnee Smollett), the film charts her family's strange collapse during the year when, she's convinced, she killed her loving father.

Samuel L. Jackson plays the beguiling Dr. Louis Batiste, most admired man in the parish, not only for his bedside manner but his between-the-sheets prowess as well. He loves the dickens out of his regal wife, Roz (Lynn Whitfield), and adores his two daughters (Meagan Good's Cisely is the older, troublesomely adolescent one) just as much, but he can't keep his hands off the willing local women.

Louis' sister Mozelle (Debbi Morgan) has her own romantic problems. A psychic of formidable gifts (some of which Eve has inherited), the one thing she can't see is a husband who won't die on her. Mozelle's Mister No. 3 gets killed at the beginning of the film, on the same night Eve catches Daddy with another woman, and the two events lead to deep and partially destructive bonding between the little girl, her aunt and her sister.

Bouncing memory off comedy, adult complexity off childish curiosity, ``Eve's Bayou'' paints comprehensive psychological studies of a half-dozen well-imagined individuals, not to mention of a place protected from the surrounding world but, in many aspects, as dangerous as it is nurturing.

Tackling the material at a lazy, character-enriching pace, Lemmons uncovers a wealth of wonderful details about Southern life and Creole superstition. She also has great insights into the workings of a smart, pre-pubescent girl's busy brain.

Though the story, which Lemmons wrote, takes a few too many shortcuts with melodramatic cliches, things play out specifically enough to defy predictability. Even when an incest subplot is introduced, it's resolved in a manner quite fresh - at least compared to the 20 other incest movies out there this season.

``Eve's Bayou'' marks the emergence of a promising, poetic filmmaker. And in young Smollett, a talent we look forward to watching grow for many years to come.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Eve's Bayou'' (R; language, sex, violence, children in jeopardy).

The stars: Jurnee Smollett, Samuel L. Jackson, Meagan Good, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan and Diahann Carroll.

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Kasi Lemmons. Produced by Caldecot Chubb and Samuel L. Jackson. Released by Trimark Pictures.

Running time: One hour, 49 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Three Stars.

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Photo

Photo: In ``Eve's Bayou,'' Lynn Whitfield, left, and Jurnee Smollett weather their family's strange collapse during a troubling year.