Mark Reviews Movies: BLUE BAYOU

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 16, 2021

If he didn't tell people he was born in Korea, only the most ignorant and prejudiced of people would even ask if Antonio LeBlanc is American. His accent is just shy of Cajun, having grown up in Southern Louisiana and still living there in New Orleans, and then there's that uniquely American dreaming of his.

Antonio is a tattoo artist by trade, but he really wants to work in a repair shop for cars and motorcycles. He knows a lot about the latter. He owns one, for one thing. Antonio has also been to prison twice, on account of a stretch of his life when he was stealing motorcycles to make money.

The owner of the repair shop where he's applying for a job in the first scene must think Antonio is joking—not about the felony conviction, which are right there on his application, but about his belief that he actually has a chance of getting hired. Antonio definitely isn't, though. This is what he wants to do for a career, and the pressure to get started is swelling. His wife is pregnant with the couple's second child, and there's more of that dreaming again: of having a two-child household and working in a field you love and genuinely believing that people should be given at least a second chance in life.

There's an argument to be made that Antonio, the protagonist of writer/director Justin Chon's Blue Bayou, never really got a first chance in his life. The character, played by Chon in a performance of emotional vulnerability, was adopted by a white American family as a child, but when his adoptive parents died, Antonio was passed from foster home to foster family, until he landed in a more permanent one.

How Antonio got where he is when we meet him—married to Kathy (Alicia Vikander) and a stepfather to her daughter Jessie (Sydney Kowalske) and expecting his first biological child—remains either a mystery or a blank slate. One suspects the latter option, given the few details we do learn. Some pains and self-doubts and feelings of being abandoned can just leave a person with nowhere to start, nowhere to go, and nowhere to turn to figure out why nothing is starting and going nowhere fast.

Chon's screenplay is part character study and, with lesser success, part melodrama, as the complications and challenges pile up on Antonio at almost every turn of this story. We can sense Chon loading a whole slew of external obstacles and conflicts upon this man, and in a movie with a lesser understanding of its main character, those elements might overwhelm and undermine everything about its story. That's not the case here, though—or, at least, it's not to such a debilitating extent.

Instead, Chon does know this character—his deep aching, insecurity, and sense of not genuinely belonging to anything or anyone. The problems Antonio faces may drive the plot, but problems within himself and his attempts to find a way to move beyond them drive this story. It's really about a guy who just wants that first chance and a country, a history, and a lot of ignorance that won't even allow him to have that.

Chon quickly establishes the character's present financial troubles and the dynamic of his family. There's a rather touching sequence in which Antonio proves that he genuinely loves and, even after his daughter is born, will continue to love Jessie, because he "chose" to. The concept of choosing to love someone is clearly at the apex of what's important to him in life, while Antonio's belief that no one has chosen or will choose to love him represents the nadir of his uncertainties about his sense of self-worth.

The plot itself begins when Kathy's ex-husband Ace (Mark O'Brien), a local police officer, just happens to run into the family at a grocery store. He has been wanting to see Jessie, who doesn't want to see him, and Ace's cop partner Denny (Emory Cohen), a lowlife bully with a badge, decides to turn the confrontation physical. Antonio responds in kind.

He is arrested and, in a complete shock, transferred to immigration enforcement. A loophole in the law means that Antonio technically isn't an American citizen. He faces deportation—a decision that he can either accept, with the possibility of returning, or fight, which could mean forfeiting his opportunity to return to the United States if he loses the appeal in court.

The issue of this legal gap is vital to the film's message (It ends with photos of real people, who were adopted in a timeframe not covered by later legislation, who either were deported or face deportation, as well as some hazy statistics, since the whole mess is pretty hazy in the first place). Chon, though, wisely keeps the focus on Antonio—his past, the struggle within his family, the choices he must make to pay for the legal process, his growing friendship with Parker (Linh-Dan Pham), a refugee from Vietnam who helps him put his priorities and choices in order.

That last relationship isn't quite as revelatory as Chon seems to believe (It basically sets up the conditions and rationale for his final choice in the film). Meanwhile, Antonio's mother-in-law (played by Geraldine Singer) and Denny seem to be overcompensating in their outright villainy for the surprising subversion of making Kathy's ex-husband a fairly lucid and sympathetic guy.

Such issues kind of come with the territory of a film with as many cultural, political, and psychological ambitions as Chon's. On a more foundational level, though, Blue Bayou gets at the sad, tragic heart of both its political message and, more importantly, its central figure.

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