Anticipation.
Chon is a promising but slightly inconsistent talent.
Enjoyment.
Ambitious but inelegantly executed.
In Retrospect.
A documentary would have better served the real-life adoptees who face this issue.
There’s no doubt that the subject matter at the heart of Justin Chon’s Blue Bayou is compelling and prescient – it focuses on the injustice of foreign-born adoptees in the United States being deported due to a legal loophole as a result of the Child Citizenship Act of 2000.
Despite having spent the majority of their lives in America with no family or life in their native country (and potentially having endured abuse at the hands of their adoptive families) these people are forced to endure lengthy and expensive legal battles, else accept deportation.
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For Antonio LeBlanc (played by Chon) this means leaving behind his pregnant wife Kathy (Alicia Vikander), adoptive daughter Jessie (Sydney Kowalske) and his job as a tattoo artist, after the immigration department rule he must leave America for his native South Korea – a country Antonio has no relationship with.
Chon gives a strong performance as Antonio, and the supporting players are equally charming, but the script is weak and often clichéd, featuring a tangle of subplots which don’t quite mesh. Advocacy group Adoptees for Justice claim Blue Bayou utilises real-life stories without consent and have called for an apology from the director who’s heart appears to be in the right place by highlighting this devastating issue of displaced adoptees.
But his execution is heavy-handed, with the ending steering into a mawkish spectacle which undercuts the seriousness of the topic at hand.
