Blue Bayou (15)

Tattoo artist Antonio LeBlanc was born in Korea, adopted at the age of three and brought to the Louisiana bayou. He was reckless in his youth, stealing motorcycles with buddy Q but has turned his life around to provide for his wife Kathy, who is pregnant with their first child, and Kathy's daughter Jessie. When the battle for custody of Jessie turns nasty, the biological father's cop partner abuses his position to arrest Antonio and place him in the custody of US immigration officers.

LondonNet Film Review
Blue Bayou (15)

Sharing its title with an achingly melancholic Roy Orbison song, which Oscar-winning lead actress Alicia Vikander performs on screen, Blue Bayou wrings melodrama from a real-life legal loophole that allows US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport some Korean-born men and women, who were adopted as children by American families before 2000. Victims can either accept their fate, return to the country of their birth and hope to return to America at a later date, or they can mount an appeal and offer compelling evidence to persuade a judge to let them stay. A legal challenge is expensive and fraught with peril: lose and the appellant forfeits any chance of returning to America…

A lawyer (Vondie Curtis-Hall) in the film soberly sums up the risk to an incredulous client (Justin Chon) and his wife (Vikander): “If he fights and loses, he can never come back.” The injustice of forcibly removing citizens in their 40s and 50s from a country they call home boils the blood of writer-director Chon’s script, tightly tethering our sympathy to a flawed lead character, who fights the decision and risks everything to stay in New Orleans. However, the writing is sometimes heavy-handed and big emotional beats, including a tense scene at an airport, feel like they have been engineered with trauma and tears in mind rather than allowed to develop organically from grave circumstances.

Tattoo artist Antonio LeBlanc (Chon) was born in Korea, adopted at the age of three and brought to the Louisiana bayou. He was reckless in his youth, stealing motorcycles with buddy Q (Altonio Jackson), and has a couple of felonies on his record which poses problems when applying for a second job. Antonio has turned his life around to provide for his wife Kathy (Alicia Vikander), who is pregnant with their first child, and Kathy’s daughter Jessie (Sydney Kowalske).

The girl’s biological father, Ace (Mark O’Brien), is a police officer, who feels aggrieved that Kathy is withholding access to his child in retaliation for him walking out on the relationship. The custody battle reaches a flashpoint when Ace’s partner Denny (Emory Cohen) abuses his badge to arrest Antonio and place him in the custody of ICE.

Blue Bayou is a labour of love for Chon, culminating in photographs of real-life adoptees who have faced the same nightmarish scenario as Antonio. The writer-director deals sensitively though not always subtly with a charged issue and in front of the camera, he delivers a strong performance and catalyses convincing screen chemistry with Vikander and Kowalske. A prosaic secondary plot involving a terminally ill Vietnamese refugee (Linh Dan Pham) is padding without a satisfying emotional pay-off.

– Kim Hu