'Blue Bayou' (2021) A Heartbreaking Concatenation Of Culture

It’s never quiet on the bayous of Louisiana. Even when the boats are docked and the pianos are shut, a cacophony of crickets, bullfrogs and dragonflies fills the silence. Justin Chon’s Blue Bayou (2021) does everything it can to impress this setting upon us. New Orleans feels like one big neon light, like an unrelenting buzz filling the electric blue and blazing orange air. And when I say “Justin Chon’s”, I mean it’s Justin Chon’s. He wrote, directed, and starred in the film as a tattoo artist named Antonio, raised on the bayou. Doing what he can to keep his family together, this character is reminiscent of Gosling’s Luke Glanton in The Place Beyond the Pines (2007) - the reformed father of an infant who rides a motorcycle, collects tattoos, and invariably strapped for cash. Nonetheless, Blue Bayou certainly carves out an original space for itself as Antonio confronts his own childhood diaspora and what it means to be an American immigrant while fighting, in a literal sense at times, to be who he already is.

Antonio’s wife Kathy is played by Alicia Vikander, who - and I’ve said it before - is phenomenal. Without giving anything away, there comes an argument in which Kathy feels it’s best to temporarily distance herself and her daughter from Antonio. This confrontation is had out in the kitchen - hot daylight pours in. Sweat beads up on the faces of our main characters, and emotions are close to surfacing. Alicia Vikander proceeds to be brilliant, one of the best actors working today. She has a way of connecting with the moment, that can only come from a firm, intuitive grip on the effect Chon aims to have with this project. Chon holds his own from an acting standpoint, laying down an unflinching Louisiana accent for this emotional role.

With Emory Cohen’s character, however, there is a little less to praise. Cohen plays Denny, a cartoonish police officer and the primary antagonist of the story. Cohen’s performance was passable, but the flaw with Denny was script-deep. Things like his walking into a scene carrying a beverage in a coconut shell, a straw protruding from the top. Of course the goal here is to frame this character as pathetic and petulant, a slave to his own temper and enamored by his own shiny badge. But details like this tread on the territory of comical, and it feels as though comedy shouldn’t have a natural place in this area of the film. If part of Chon’s mission is to annotate the idea that police often act reprehensibly given the impunity provided by the uniform, then perhaps installing a typical officer would have been a more effective vehicle for this headline. He can’t shut up about sausage, for instance. Being such an enthusiast, we see Denny’s reaction to a video he’d seen about how sausage is made. This arouses him to downright anger. A classic set-and-spike in Chon’s writing - and it is funny; I want to be careful to communicate this note correctly. It is not a swing and a miss, it simply didn’t feel as though comedy had any place in the batter’s box - not in this role, anyway.

There are some stylistic components to Blue Bayou that will keep you in your seat. Firstly, the aesthetic is beautiful. The picture was shot on 16mm film, a selling point for any cinephile. For those less familiar, shooting on film is a LOT more expensive than shooting digital. Money starts burning every time action is called on the set of a movie shot on film, but projects like Blue Bayou remind us why so many directors push for it anyway; film gives the footage a “look” that is not easily articulated, but to the trained eye, is distinctly more cinematic than digital footage. Take it up with Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson or Christopher Nolan - all directors that refuse to shoot on anything else. 

Enough about what was in the camera, and more about what was on it. Cinematographers Ante Cheng and Matthew Chuang expertly compose every frame. There are a handful of magnificent shots that frame Antonio under a bridge, staring off longingly at the only country he’s ever known, against an impossibly vibrant sunset. Another standout shot comes when Antonio is assaulted by two police officers in a grocery store in front of his family. As he is held down on the linoleum tile floor, beaten with nightsticks, the camera comes on close on his face; the agony captured by the character’s breath fogging the lens. We can almost feel his breathing - heavy and panicked. Conveying the emotion in a circumstance like this is rarely done so efficiently; that is, there is usually much more that is lost in their transmission. But Cheng and Chuang turn around and do it again with adrenaline; Antonio is an accomplice to a robbery in this story, and the hours afterward are filled with tenuous anxiety. This sequence was shot using a very low frame rate (my guess would be ~10 frames/second) as opposed to 24. This embellishes chaos, as the viewership scrambles to keep up with what is happening on screen. 

Deportation statistics might be sausage to some; consumed as a regular part of a media diet without much thought. Blue Bayou, in this metaphor, would be tantamount to the film that drove Denny to rage. The film refuses to blink. It shows us just how pernicious and merciless some of these cases can be. I’ll tell you this because it won’t cheapen it at all -the end will rip your heart out. Chon chose to tell a story that demands to be told, meaning that this engine always had a lot of horsepower. Cheng and Chuang built a rich blue green body around it, with an orange underglow. Put some smooth New Orleans jazz on the stereo and Justin Chon in the driver’s seat, and I’ll ride shotgun any day of the week.