Supremely admirable and in every angle charming, Jay will surely keep me enthralled forever. So to speak, it is one of the best Cinemalaya has predestinedly produced and will give a mark in the exciting journey of Philippine independent filmmaking in the auspicious future of the country's national cinema. Winning the most important award, Best Film, at the 2008 Cinemalaya Awards side by side with a Best Actor award for the spellbinding performance of Baron Geisler, Jay is Francis Xavier Pasion's debut film.
Jay is an exciting story of a documentarist named Jay (Baron Geisler) who is moving heaven and earth to create an episode for their show about the poor victims of different crimes. He investigates, explores, and shoots the death, the burial, and how the family, relatives, and friends accepted the horrible fate of a gay man found dead by terrible stabs at his apartment in Manila, who is coincidentally his a namesake of him. This coincidence of similarities grows as the plot thickens, and eventually, and unfortunately, even is namesake's murder will be a similarity he would never ever wish. Formally rich, jay revolves around the narrative pattern of similarity and repetition which in a high degree is a docile yet effective technique of nailing the audiences' consciousness into engagement with the film. These resemblances of the two Jays: firstly their names, their sexual orientation, the mother's sentiment of seeing her deceased son into the documentarist Jay, and the comfortable moments of the living Jay with the dead Jay's ex-boyfriend are not superficially playing the mere purpose of feeding the assumption that men's minds work in approximations. Nevertheless, these witty analogical connections all lead to the final scene and implied ending—documentarist's death, which is the over-all and ultimate likeness of the two Jays. The indirect reference of the final sequence to death has an intrinsic and intertextual intelligence with Alejandro Gonzales Inarittu's “Babel”, where the final scene of the Japanese father embracing the barenaked daughter (Rinko Kikuchi) in their terrace as the camera movers back revealing the dark and beautiful modern Tokyo city at night suggests the somber sexual relationship of the two. This ending of Jay assumes an ending out of what the whole film convinces us to assume is at least on the film language, almost as good as that of Babel's ending, but beyond, in the language of what it speaks about gays in our society, it is actually has nothing quite new to add. As a matter of fact, it still submits to the long-time and repressed emancipation of the homosexuals. The film may actually say that any gay man has to be killed brutally, not even just simply die, but brutally. The implied resolution seems to play a safe statement and leaves the audience baffled whether we have to strip all the supporting elements of the narrative off our minds, violate film coherence and hope for a more queer-loving ending. At this point, I believe that Jay reports, more than it criticizes. That is why it borrows an external form of documentary films, to emphasize that it pretends not to be a solution to an elusive societal understanding of homosexuality but rather, like a documentary, reveals and presents reality and let the viewers do the rest. Aside from deconstructing or exposing the real notoriety of the manipulations of the famous media it likewise leaves very much open how gay men live in what is thought to be a less homophobic society.
Complementing the truth, the film Jay wants to achieve while the protagonist Jay tries to alter for cinematic purposes, is an ultra-realistic approach to the philosophy of filming it. The attracting silence, zero-musical scoring of the entire film, except the final cut of the documentary playing at the beginning of the film, expands the volume of its realism. The difference between the presence of music in the documented story airing on television and the absence of non-diegetic sounds at the whole process of the documentation distinguishes the boundary of what is purely real and what is the mediated real. The connection of the story to real events such as Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, and even Manny Pacquaio's fight also contribute to the achievement of the film's objective. The acting is as natural as it gets. Choosing amateur actors is a tried and tested formula to achieving realistic acting, but witrh crying sequences just like in jay, the purpose is not fully done, though it didn't cause much devastation to the whole. On the main hand, Baron Geisler is a flamboyant choice for the lead role. He for me is absolutely perfect for the role. I can't almost reckon that an actor so unfavorably known as bad, prodigal, and drunkard can play a gay role so well that every single bit of the tone of his voice and minute details of his mannerisms would totally oblige you to pay this actor the most towering respects. Coco Martin, who simply and quietly did his job plays the shy ex-boyfriend of the murdered Jay. This affectionate character is his comfort role. He does this type of character more convincingly and admirably than the fierce character he used to play in the T.V. Series “Tayong Dalawa”. Geisler's surprising and endearing femininity creates a good juxtapositional blending with Martin's timidity which glimmers commensally with the incandescent character of Geisler.
The cinematographic use of space in Jay is admirable. There are scenes where a frame is not totally consumed by the subjects and lately reveals the role of the empty space. In an early scene, the van of Channel where Jay is working for parks at the middle of the frame while the house of Jay's family in Bacolor occupies the right portion. A noticeable space at the left portion is then vacant, lately it serves as a space for Jay making a call for his producers. Another is observes when jay together with the mother of the victim jay is talking. There is a strikingly unused space in the composition where a cabinet is placed. Later, Jay finds photographs of the mourned Jay together with his ex-lover inside.
Undeniably engaging, Jay is a highly captivating film.
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