Film portrayals of immigration are always addressed from the emotional aspect. The person may even come to their new country without any trouble and without any trauma, but then there are always the crushing pains of coming in, and feeling home, as shown in Brooklyn and Avalon. At first glance, the film Blue Bayou makes you feel great empathy towards the part of the immigration system which is being headlined too much. In revealing the situation of children that were adopted from other countries by American families and never made American citizens, Bush focuses on a facet of immigration which She is not very used to. Out of the many factors that put them at risk of deportation, many return to places they have no memories of or know anyone there.
Immigration documentarians Justin Chon does well in exploring this niche through Antonio LeBlanc, an American of Korean descent based in Louisiana. He is full of love towards his wife Kathy (Alicia Vikander) and is an ideal husband to a pregnant Kathy and a caring stepfather to her little daughter Jessie (Sydney Kowalske). An extreme tattooed biker who worked at a tattoo shop, Antonio, is not your ordinary dad. He called up Jessie at home and told her to skip school with him. But just like that, Antonio can’t get a break as well.
He carries two serious offenses in his history due to which his chances of gaining a better-paying job with added benefits are quite slim and he is therefore always aggressive in over-due about his ever growing bills with a less awe-inspiring mother in law bothering him in one corner. These include the gross understatement and the glaring omissions and their commission could lead to Amelia, their most familiar missing link. Here comes Tommy in the frame, their juvenile fourth member who is also not out of trouble, and is more or less constant in trouble with the city’s officials. Still the more egregious is Kathy’s former husband reputedly played by Mark O’brien, a more erect scaredy. Kop T. By contrast, Deputy Budda, an ex-cop from New Orleans who neglected Kathy and Jessie, is now desperate to re-enter their lives and fights tooth and nail for Antonio’s spot. And he is never too polite once those bad feelings get the best of him and it leads him to pretty much rock bottom and gets into a fistfight which lands him into trouble with the police and subsequently ICE detention due to his non-naturalized status. From that shock outcome, he is like all the rest in the situation and along with Kathy goes crazed trying to raise money to hire a representative who would argue in court on his behalf to allow him to remain.
Although the issues are piling on Antonio unfalteringly, Chon’s realistic cinematography brings out the family feel in the film. The viewer is given this sneaky peek into realities even as the film refuses to cross over into cheap melodrama. These are not the adult scar tissues abuse that we have revisioned, instead the very real emotional aches that we are allowed to see, fully nurtured in the preadolescent Antonios life, that would later guide into melancholy in adulthood. We get to feel the sore gaps which Antonio has managed to hide from himself and his wife until that time when he had to face the repercussions of being adopted and fostered by dreadful ‘parents.’
The crisis of acquiring cash and reinforcing his immigration status leads to a secondary romance with Parker (Linh Dan Pham), a cancer-ridden Vietnamese woman seeking a tattoo from Antonio. It is further embedded as Pham’s Parker gets Antonio’s understanding about its gaping hole so that he wonders about his lost heritage which has never ever been invoked in him by anyone. It catches everybody’s breath like a much needed, quiet hand as if it were appearing just when the curtains are drawn on the two character’s more than brilliantly fated situations.
The other main actors are no less than stupendous as well. Chon’s Antonio, for the record, is totally away from how a boy would talk if he was living in a bayou parroting voices he knows how to imitate to mimic people with whom he interacted when he was little. Even with all those blunders, he has been able to command love and compassion of the abolished family through Kathy and Jessie. And both actresses do not let the intensity die down and deliver rather discreet heartwarming acts, undoubtedly young Kowalske at some point brings us from intense behearation of the father to unbearable bijna not shred of continuity regret and regret where her performance, well just made me bring so much waterworks out of my system.
Where the fault of the film is, is regarding the manipulation of Ace and his alpha male second-in-command. A little in this and a little longer in that. Otherwise, this development in the film is the only time when the heavy handed over milder stimulation of that genre appeared and too much of it. The real answer to the great remedy to why it feels off is because there is no further need for this in Chon’s film. It goes without saying the brutality of the situation in Antonio’s case which is exactly what many real children adopted from abroad these days suffer is probably enough to convey the message the movie wants to deliver.
What Blue Bayou allows Chon to express in every possible manner, is bittersweet, stunning, and disturbing at the same time.
The Verdict
Blue Bayou is a description of a man searching for himself and also acts as a disturbingly revealing portrayal of the more obscure flaws in our immigration system. Understanding the problem through the less active but equally dense life of Antonio brings some warmth to an aspect of people’s lives that many cannot even begin to comprehend, or would prefer to turn a blind eye towards. If the final scene comes down with such a force that it makes you want to avoid ever watching it again, that is alright, because it does not matter, because writer/director/star Justin Chon has achieved what he sets out to achieve with this film anyway.
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