Rootless Water Lilies: A Review of Justin Chon’s Blue Bayou (2021)

By Jiwon Lee

Even water lilies have their roots, but what roots does Blue Bayou (2021) rest on?  

Justin Chon has become a staple name in the film industry as a renowned writer/director ever since the success of his directorial debut, Gook (2017). Like all other Asian cinephiles, I, too, have been desperately waiting for the release of his newest drama film, Blue Bayou (2021). Blue Bayou has stirred up excitement amongst Chon fans as he not only wrote and directed the film but also acted in it as the film’s main protagonist, Antonio LeBlanc.

Let me start by saying Blue Bayou, aesthetically, did not disappoint. Chon’s filmic aesthetics, which have slowly built since the stylish black-and-white cinematography of Gook, truly climaxed in Blue Bayou.  

The tear-jerking narrative about a Korean American adoptee struggling to keep his family  together in the United States is interspersed with beautiful shots of LeBlanc’s fragmented  memories of his birth mother. Chon makes gorgeous use of lighting, picturesquely framing the LeBlanc family silhouetted by the New Orleans sunset. The trippy theft scene Chon creates by experimenting with frame rates was a fascinating visual addition to the film as well. So, yes, Blue Bayou is a beautiful film — aesthetically speaking.

But what is this visual beauty grounded in? What are the roots of these gorgeously shot scenes?  

Even without the current controversy surrounding the film (explained in detail later in the paragraph), the film’s narrative feels very un-rooted. The in-your-face jokes about New Orleans culture and stereotypical, over-dramatized portrayals of Southern policemen hinted that Blue Bayou does not have the personal stakes that Gook did for the California-born filmmaker. While Chon’s performance, in addition to the performances of talents such as Alicia Vikander and Linh Dan Pham, was absolutely amazing, it was not enough to make Blue Bayou feel raw. The ungrounded narrative and confusing character motives make it clear that Chon is an outsider relying on general sentimentalism to deliver the story to the audience. He drives this sentimentalism home with the final deportation scene, in which he had to make little Jessie call for her father one last time with a big cry. While it did almost bring me to tears, I could not help but think: this is plain old sentimentalism for sentimentalism’s sake. 

Adding to the aloofness of the film is, of course, the controversy surrounding it — the boycotting of the film by Adoptees of Justice. One member, Adam Crasper, a Korean adoptee who was deported in 2016, revealed to  the press that the movie appropriated his story without his consent. While I cannot speak for how true Crasper’s claims are, as Chon did post his side of the story on Instagram, the fact that many adoptees actually felt uncomfortable and misrepresented by the film only seemed to prove my gut feeling about the problem of its narrative.

While, again, I cannot speak for how accurate the portrayal of the adoptee life is in Blue Bayou,  as a Korean, I was confused by the gorgeously shot flashbacks of LeBlanc. No doubt, these  flashbacks are supposed to be the aesthetic pinnacle of the film. With the eerie blue colors, the  graceful dance of LeBlanc’s birth mother, and the slow-motion underwater scenes, Chon definitely put a lot of effort into making these shots a work of visual poetry. Yet, I could not shake off how awkward these shots felt. First of all, LeBlanc was born in the 80s. Why is the  birth mother dressed in rag-like hanbok (traditional Korean dress)? Why is she dancing in that  same hanbok in some Florida-swamp-looking forest? Her costume makes her look like she just  got out of the Korean War, although the setting was clearly supposed to be 1980s Korea. No  woman walked around in such hanbok in the 80s. Chon sacrificed historical accuracy for cool-looking shots that looked more “Asian,” and I could not shake off how vaguely Orientalist it felt. The discomfort I felt during this scene made me more sympathetic toward the boycotters, who must have felt a similar sense of discomfort at Chon’s focus on sentimental aesthetics over accurate representation.  

All of this to say, Blue Bayou is a gorgeous film. Those who know nothing about the film’s controversy may enjoy it, even call it a masterpiece. But if the community Chon tried to represent, as the end credits with photos of deported adoptees so emotionally emphasized, felt offended by this, what grounds does this beauty of a film stand on? The water lilies have bloomed and they satisfy our eyes, but if they have no roots, can you still call them genuine flowers?