The savage take of 'Citizen Jake' on present-day Philippines

The one movie I recall watching with my father as a teen-ager was Sakada by the “subversive” director Behn Cervantes in the mid-1970s, the height of Martial Law when my dad was a foreign service officer with a duty to defend the regime overseas.

I would only appreciate many years later the irony of his choice of film. Perhaps it was his way of introducing me to social injustice without having to talk to me about it. The story of the rebellious son of a hacendero who sides with his family’s sugar workers was an epiphany for a teen-ager raised in a cocoon of media censorship. It would turn out to be a rare privilege as the movie was taken out of circulation by the government.

I recalled that subversive Sakada moment as I sat with an expectant crowd at the premiere of director Mike de Leon’s opus Citizen Jake at UP Diliman’s Cine Adarna last Saturday night. Considering its political content and de Leon’s uncompromising attitude towards distribution, there was no telling if there would be another screening.

It’s a film that has been creating buzz for months for a variety of reasons, not least because the reclusive auteur last directed a full-length film nearly 20 years ago and this one is supposedly de Leon’s reaction to the perfidies of the Duterte administration. Then there’s the daring casting of journalist Atom Araullo in the lead role of a crusading blogger torn by his conscience.

Atom portrays Jake Herrera, a Baguio-based teacher and “citizen journalist” who blogs about politics and rebels against his feudalistic senator father.

Jake’s refuge from his messy family life is the idyllic family rest house in Baguio, where the Ingglisero konyo kid is kind to the elderly Igorot caretakers and is best friends with their son, the Wright Park pony boy Jonie.

But even that haven would soon be violated by the greed and politics of his father and brother.

Jake is the rock at the center of a swirling cesspool of evil, always in danger of being swept up in its currents. A brooding millennial, Jake is tortured by the knowledge that he’s the son of a former Marcos crony.

Woven around the conflict with his father are a quest to learn the fate of his missing mother, his investigation into the murder of a young prostitute, and the struggle to maintain his relationship with a winsome college professor played by Max Collins.

Looming over his personal agonies are the cataclysmic contemporary issues familiar to anyone not living in a cave: the creeping return of dictatorship, the rehabilitation of the Marcoses, and technology’s assault on our collective brain.

All the interconnected plot lines make for a complicated life for a guy who just wants to escape to Baguio. But with his cell phone constantly ringing and a blog dropping bombshells on his family mansion in Manila, there’s no escaping a wired world.

But Jake tries with his visits to the grizzled Baguio poet Lucas (played with a perfect touch of madness by Lou Veloso), a former Martial Law detainee who rants in public about Marcos and constantly re-anchors Jake in the bigger picture, where he is challenged to break out of his bourgeois upbringing and align himself with people like the caretaker family in his household.

It’s a clash of civilizations, the modern confusion stoked by fake news versus Lucas’ quaint clarity of what’s good and evil.

The film forces viewers to confront new boundaries between truth and lies, where obvious falsehoods often gain more traction than mundane facts. Helping us navigate is Jake the blogger who has to defend his corner of the media ecosystem to younger millennials who question the value of journalism and declare as hoaxes proven facets of our history.

In a way, Jake personifies the un-troll, a thoughtful online denizen who must be sure of his facts. Jake’s persona is the movie’s paean to the enduring nobility of journalism. I was one of the skeptics who had thought casting Araullo as a journalist might confuse the public even more, by making other real-world journalists seem like actors.

But that is one of the burning questions of the film: who now is a journalist when everyone can publish and distribute content? Even someone in a make-believe role can be a truth seeker.

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The answer lies in one’s motivations and methods, as journalism is one of the rare professions that do not require a license to practice. Amid the noise and disruptions of social media, what marks real journalists is a timeless devotion to know and present the truth, regardless of family and political ties.

The film sometimes strays into didactic detours to convey these messages, an extra effort at clarity for those who went to the movie for the lead actor’s looks.

Jake’s grim earnestness is almost a cartoony contrast to his thuggish older brother Roxie (Gabby Eigenmann), a young congressman obsessed with The Godfather movies who sees himself in the hot-headed, ill-fated Sonny Corleone, a comparison that will reveal itself apropos at the end (in one amusing scene, the exasperated senator-father barks at Roxie to stop with the “Godfather shit.”).

The tension in Jake between principle and family reaches a savage resolution, both an expression of the filmmaker’s outrage and a dark view of the Filipino in this dystopian age.

All this bleak gravitas is tempered by the nostalgic atmospherics of the film’s Baguio setting, nearly a movie character itself, with an archival flashback to its colonial history and embodied today by Jake’s wooden family bungalow. The worn wood of the interiors, including an irregularly cut dining tabletop, adds a warm touch to one of the heaviest movies of recent times.

A deceptively serene Baguio is the brilliant choice of place for a violent meditation on where our basic values of honesty and decency have gone, or whether we ever had them at all. —LA/KG, GMA News