Blue Bayou

The opening sequence of "Blue Bayou" is devastating in its simplicity. Antonio LeBlanc (Justin Chon, who wrote and directed the film as well) sits in a job interview. The voice offscreen asks him where he's from. Antonio says a little north of New Orleans. The voice comes back: "No. Where are you from?" This is not new territory for Antonio. He's been here before. He is basically forced to say, "Korea," even though he was adopted and brought to America when he was three years old, has no ties to Korea, and considers himself an American. He is an American. "Blue Bayou" works best in small moments like this, where the point is made without having to hammer it home. There's a lot of "hammering home" in "Blue Bayou," where symbols are wielded like mallets.

"Blue Bayou" is not subtle, but the issue at hand isn't subtle either. People who were adopted into American families, sometimes 30, 40 years ago, are facing deportation in increasing numbers, a process that rips up families and shatters lives. These people are Americans. They have no connection to where they were born, no family there, nothing. The system is rigged against them. There is no appeal. There is no due process.

Antonio is a down-on-his-luck tattoo artist, living in New Orleans. His past is shady. He used to run with a crew of motorcycle thieves, and he racked up a couple of felonies. He's clean now, but his past will be a huge problem once he faces deportation. He's married to Kathy (Alicia Vikander), a nurse, who is pregnant with his child. They are also raising Jessie (Sydney Kowalske), Kathy's daughter from a previous relationship. Jessie's biological dad is a blue-eyed cop named Ace (Mark O’Brien), furious that his daughter is being "kept" from him. This powder-keg erupts during an altercation at a grocery store, when Ace's partner (Emory Cohen)—a buffoonish caricature of a "bad cop"—looking to avenge his friend, attacks Antonio and drags him off to the local ICE facility.

Once the process starts, it's almost impossible to stop. There are no appeals: who would one even appeal to? ICE is designed as an end-point, not a way-station. People vanish into ICE's grip. Antonio was adopted when he was three years old. He has no ties to Korea. Turns out, though, his adopted parents didn't fill out the citizenship papers, or didn't file them properly. He's screwed. The great Vondie Curtis-Hall plays a lawyer, whose retainer is a daunting $5,000. He knows his way around such cases. His outlook is not hopeful. He has almost no solutions.

"Blue Bayou" is sunk, on occasion, by its own symbolism, and how it wields said symbols. It's not enough to use a symbol visually, and let the audience put two and two together. A character needs to have a long monologue where they explain the symbol and pontificate on how the symbol is relevant to the circumstances. This happens multiple times. It's extremely heavy-handed. Chon intersperses artsy-looking dreamy fragments throughout, sudden flashes of a lake glowing blue, a woman seen from below the water, a flash of a face through a rainy window. In contrast to the mostly hand-held footage of the rest, these sequences should be more compelling than they are. Instead, they are self-conscious and super-imposed, an unnecessary cinematic "flex."