In the opening scene of Blue Bayou, Antonio LeBlanc is interviewing for a job. “Where you from?” asks the man hiring. “I’m from an hour north of Baton Rouge,” Antonio replies. The man asks again, “Where you from?”

Antonio is Korean-born, having been adopted by American citizens when he was just an infant. The question this interviewer asks is all too familiar for those of us in the Asian diaspora (“Where are you really from?”). Despite his American demeanor—his cajun accent, his neck tattoos—society treats Antonio as Asian first, the perpetual foreigner. The scene sets the mood for the remainder of the film, as Antonio must reckon with what it means to be an “American.”

Blue Bayou is set in New Orleans, where Antonio (Justin Chon) resides with his wife Kathy (Oscar winner Alicia Vikander) and step-daughter Jesse (Sydney Kowalske). With a baby on the way, Antonio is struggling to support his family, barely making ends meet at a tattoo parlor. After an unfortunate encounter with Kathy’s ex and Jesse’s father, NOPD officer Ace (Mark O’Brien), and his partner Denny (Emory Cohen), Antonio is jailed and, in a surprising turn of events, faces deportation. Despite being adopted by Americans and living in the country for over 30 years, his adoptive parents neglectfully never filed the proper paperwork for Antonio to become a naturalized citizen. The 2000 Child Citizenship Act failed to grant citizenship to adoptees who turned 18 before the law’s passing, thus threatening the lives of tens of thousands of transnational adoptees like Antonio, deporting them back to a country they’ve never known.

Written and directed by Chon, Blue Bayou is an intimate family drama that tells a national tragedy. Admittedly, the film does veer into melodrama as it tackles a little bit too much in its ambition, with some questionable story decisions that border on contrivance. There’s Antonio’s strained relationship with his adoptive parents, his fantastical visions of his birth mother, his financial struggles leading him to a life of crime, his constant run-ins with the antagonistic cops that put him in this situation (Emory Cohen is distractingly cartoonish as the uber racist cop), and the fact that one of his best friends is an ICE agent. But the film’s saving grace is its character work. Chon, born and raised in Southern California, and Vikander, from Sweden, are convincing in both their respective New Orleans accents as well as their characters’ love and dedication for one another, and Kowalske is an impressive child actor who effectively portrays a child’s confusion on why exactly her family is being torn apart.

The film’s most pleasant surprise is the inclusion of Parker (a standout Linh-Dan Pham), a Vietnamese American woman Antonio meets by chance. She helps Antonio navigate through his crisis by inviting him into her family, who all escaped from Vietnam to the U.S. by boat decades ago, allowing him the chance to learn and accept his own Asian American identity. The addition of the Parker plotline is one of the story decisions that can feel random and distracting to the overall film, but the scenes with Parker’s Vietnamese family are so warm, inviting, and sweet that you can’t help but want these scenes to overstay their welcome (though, I could be biased since I’m a Vietnamese American born and raised in New Orleans). There’s a scene when Antonio asks Parker’s father if he regrets splitting up his family into separate boats when they attempted to escape from Vietnam, so as to maximize their chances at survival (half of the family perished at sea). No, he responds. He has no regrets. This moment, like most of the film, is not subtle, but it’s a unique way of tying back to Antonio’s story of doing whatever it takes to ensure his own family’s survival, as well as tying back to Antonio’s birth mother’s decision to give him away. It’s as profound as it is heartbreaking.

One of the first films I’d seen Chon star in was the 2013 comedy 21 & Over, and though the plot revolved around his character Jeff Chang, he was literally reduced to a prop (and a stereotypically Asian one, at that) in order to focus on his two white friends (played by Miles Teller and Skyler Astin). I’m proud to say Chon has come a long way since then, having spent the last several years writing and directing his own films depicting the lives of multi-faceted Korean Americans (2017’s Gook and 2019’s Ms. Purple). He was inspired to write Blue Bayou after hearing about the real life deportation issue from his adoptee friends. “My purpose as an Asian American filmmaker is first and foremost to bring empathy to our entire community… and one of the things that’s important is not only to represent my own experience or my own culture. It’s to represent all of us,” Chon said. By centering Blue Bayou around Asian American deportees, Chon challenges the more superficial depictions of Asian American representation in film, like the oft-spoken importance of Crazy Rich Asians or, more recently, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to “our culture.” Chon feels “the adoptee experience is a big sort of pillar in the community, but is rarely talked about. There’s not much representation in film and television about that experience, so I thought it was very important to try to represent that community.”

This is a film that showcases the cruelty of the American legal system, how the country sets up its most marginalized for failure. There is rarely any redemption for the formerly incarcerated who’ve made mistakes and can no longer find a job willing to take a chance on them, forcing them back into a life of crime. There is no sympathy for people who are being removed from the only home they’ve ever known, who had no say in their adoption in the first place, sending them to a place where they don’t speak their language, which is essentially a death sentence. 

Yes, Blue Bayou may lack subtlety. Yes, some conflicts may feel too manufactured. But the visceral reaction it invokes makes this a story worth telling. The film’s coda depicts the real-life faces of Asian American adoptees who have been deported or are facing deportation. The worst thing it can do is bring attention to this severe injustice. The best thing it can do is cause actual change.

Three and a half out of four Kents.

‘Blue Bayou’ premieres in theatres starting September 17, 2021.

Take Action

Earlier this year, a bipartisan group of legislators introduced a new bill that would close the loophole from the 2000 act. So far there hasn’t been any action since this new bill’s introduction in March. You can learn more and help advocate for this change at adopteecitizenshipact.org.