Of Particular Interest
By M.D. dela Cruz Tan

It’s like Ed Burns’ 15 Minutes.  Sans the violence.  Or maybe Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog.  Sans the Hollywood sheen.  Or even Costa-Gavras’ Mad City.  Sans the original sharp wit.  And, oh, it has that (should I say now usual?) gay twist, too, a la La Mala Educacion (as one acquaintance critic said).  Yet, again, sans Pedro Almodovar’s always refreshing re-take on formulaic filmmaking approaches.

Jay (2008)		Perhaps I should explain myself. Francis Xavier Pasion’s Jay – which won the Best Picture Award in the 2008 Cinemalaya Film Festival* for “its sheer originality, its energetic storytelling, its mastery of digital technology in order to tell a story that is a trenchant commentary on the technology itself, and its very revealing take on the media and the uses and abuses of the truth” – is a story within a story, as it tells the story of Jay Santiago (Baron Geisler), a film producer out to make a documentary on the life of Jay Mercado, a homosexual teacher brutally murdered in his home in Bacolor, Pampanga.
Director: Francis X. Pasion Cast: Baron Geisler Coco Martin

Two related narratives ensue in parallel developments, eventually linking up.

On the one hand, the two Jays’ lives sort of blend (e.g. falling for the same guy in gay indie films’ favorite actor Coco Martin’s character), making for an interesting subject – somewhat a la Jewish Woody Allen’s Jewish characterizations of his personas in his films.  This is especially noteworthy because of Jay Santiago’s gung ho approach to tell the story of Jay Mercado come what may, so that he takes things too personally – as it was in Mad City, where Dustin Hoffman’s manipulative moves – instead of simply giving him a story – cost John Travolta his life, so that the media (Hoffman) ceased to merely report (its main duty) to became a manipulator of truth it presented (in Travolta).

On the other hand, and still related (to the above), Jay, thus, becomes an interesting take at the medium it uses, itself.  Much like 15 Minutes, in more ways than one – here’s the media everyone is using to get that 15 minutes to fame, and when that media is used to manipulate everyone for those who produced it to get what they want to get out of us, we still watch, anyway, because, hey, it’s the media, after all.  A commentary on how, even if the source is credible, everything we get from it is automatically believable, or even true – even more so when talking about media.

This is like taking Jon Red’s Radyo a notch higher (yes, that one was an indie film, but it sold itself more as a thriller/horror, i.e. based on traditional definition, with the involvement of dead bodies it then qualifies as a horror film, than anything else) – there, we were mere viewers; but here, we are the one manipulated by the one manipulated by the media used.  It’s like doing something in Makati City what Bart or Lisa Simpson will do in Springfield after watching Itchy and Scratchy do it in TV, too.  Criticized for our voyeurism by a film closely looking at voyeurism by being, in itself, voyeuristic.

Even with a non-typical Filipino take at a subject matter, this is, by no means, a perfect film – not by a long shot.  But that it attempts to be that makes it worth watching.

Especially when we have the likes of Kris Aquino who, at one point, openly discusses her sex life (e.g. STI care of Joey Marquez), and then at another point asks for her privacy to be respected (particularly in “personal matters”).  Or including in the headlines who got booted off in the Pinoy Dream Academy, right before that news about the death toll of some typhoon overseas.  Or the emphasis more on what the politicians wear, instead of what the President has to say about the real state of the nation.

A closer look at the media is needed, indeed.

But an even closer look is needed at our consumption of the media.

That Jay attempts to do that... well, that’s more than good enough for a start.