Blue Bayou (2021)

(On Cable TV, September 2022) At first glance, the plot summary of Blue Bayou sounds like a far-fetched dystopian thing that people who hate the United States invent to exaggerate what’s wrong with America. After all, what sane country would deny citizenship, decades later, to grown children from other countries adopted by American citizens? And yet, a cursory look at the film’s production history shows that it’s a real and horrifying problem, with people being deported in an utterly foreign land by dint of legal loopholes, lost paperwork and a cruel system. Blue Bayou is eventually not as much of a character-driven drama as we may expect from the first few minutes (with writer-director-producer-star Justin Chon turning in a likable presence as a Southern-accented character of Asian ethnicity)—it steadily grows into a full-fledged social issue film, indignant and merciless in its description of a problem that should not exist. As such, combined with the film’s gritty lower-class approach, don’t expect Blue Bayou to be fun or comforting to watch: It’s made to make people unnerved and indignant. It pretty much presses all the buttons it has at its disposal to get a rise out of viewers—a blunt strategy that may annoy, but doesn’t take away from the film’s atmosphere, or how Chon created a hard-hitting film around himself. It does feel a bit too long with a few useless subplots, but Blue Bayou hits its objectives, and it lingers on as an exposure to a particularly cruel trick played on undeserving people.