Truth, courage and Citizen Jake
Afriend asked if I would do a review on Citizen Jake. I can’t. It’s Mike de Leon. One of Philippine cinemas greatest directors with another socially relevant movie. You simply need to watch it and relive those scenes, dialogues and characters in your head.
That’s the power of de Leon’s films. It engages you. It draws you to the characters and their conflict that reflect the times. During the Marcos dictatorship, his Sister Stella L embodied courage. While his Batch 81 displayed the spiral of frat violence.
Citizen Jake comes at this time when millennials are wired into social media, yet disconnected with the realities of our politics. An old director steps in, 19 years after making his previous movie, to deliver a film that tells this generation to think deeply.
Citizen Jake, blogger/journalist Jake Herrera (played by journalist Atom Araullo), embodies the millennial generation, a conscientious truth-seeker in an age of fake news, revisionist history and social media savviness. Jake narrates his story, at times staring directly to the audience, similar to the Sister Stella L and the directors in Bayaning Third World, to tell us that truth is stranger than fiction, and one needs the courage to face such truth.
Jake typifies the conflicts and contradictions of the middle class. He comes from a family of privilege, born to a father who is a Marcos crony and politician. It is a privilege that grants him access to write stories, yet this privilege covers up the secrets of his family, which he abhors.
He retreats to Baguio where he can write his blog against his father and politicians. But what happens when truth strikes close to him? The murder of a student linked to political blackmail, and his recurring nightmares of his mother who disappeared, keep haunting him.
The second half of the movie hems these conflicts well, like an investigative story, which brings us to a tragic climax. Truth becomes ugly and in the final confrontation, Jake is tormented and it leaves us haunted.
We sympathize with Jake, and the other characters as well. There is Jonie, who is the son of Jake’s housekeepers and is Jake’s closest friend. There is Lucas, the grizzled professor who stokes passion against the Marcoses with memory and poems. These characters anchor Jake in the reality of class and conflict.
This is a movie that meshes reality with fiction, taking swipes against politicians and trolls. These serves a purpose of asking the truths we know. How much of this is revision, disinformation and propaganda?
This movie strikes a message to this new generation, and perhaps to all of us, to step out of our ideal world and be connected to what is truly happening to our people. De Leon makes us confront ugly truths like Citizen Jake. What happens next is a matter of courage, and that is what this movie is all about.