Movie review: Blue Bayou a timely film about the America behind myth of the melting-pot

Targeted for deportation because of his cultural heritage, Antonio's life gets minced up by the bureaucratic machinery in engrossing Blue Bayou

Blue Bayou

★★★☆☆

It’s one of the great paradoxes about America that it has been a cultural melting-pot ever since the Pilgrims arrived, but has never been fully at ease with that fact.

Set in Louisiana, Blue Bayou (15A) explores the plight of Korean-born Antonio LeBlanc (Justin Chon), who came to America as a three-year-old boy when he was adopted by ‘white folk’. 

Now a tattoo artist with a criminal past, Antonio is married to Kathy (Alicia Vikander) and step-dad to young Jessie (Sydney Kowlaske), and about to become a father for the first time. 

But when he runs afoul of a racist cop — the partner of Kathy’s embittered ex, Ace (Mark O’Brien) — Antonio comes to the attention of the immigration authorities, who immediately set about deporting him back to a country he can’t even remember.

Alicia Vikander (left), Sydney Kowalske and Justin Chon in a scene from Blue Bayou.

Written and directed by Justin Chon, Blue Bayou is a timely film about the America that exists behind the myth of the melting-pot. 

There is a Kafkaesque quality to the way Antonio’s life gets minced up by the bureaucratic machinery, certainly, but there’s no doubting that he is specifically targeted for deportation because of his cultural heritage, as a result of which the 30 or so years Antonio spent living as an American count for nothing.

For the most part an engrossing drama — the offbeat relationship between Antonio and his stepdaughter Jessie provides the story with its beating heart, with young Sydney Kowalske stealing every scene she’s in — Blue Bayou tries to do too much in its latter stages, which results in a number of subplots falling away unresolved and a wildly histrionic denouement that descends into bathos. 

(cinema release)