Jersey Baptism evokes the ecstatic highs of a young and adrift New York City couple’s impromptu road trip to Mexico, and the eventual lows as it comes crashing down just outside the New York City limits.
Jersey Baptism evokes the ecstatic highs of a young and adrift New York City couple’s impromptu road trip to Mexico, and the eventual lows as it comes crashing down just outside the New York City limits.
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Guy and Lucy are embittered by the commodification of New York, now alienated and yearning for a sense of home and connection. It explores the spirit of youth, as well as their disillusionment, and the romanticized notion of running away from what you know, toward seemingly endless possibilities.
The theme of escape is a rich tapestry to explore through the film medium. Escape is a human behavior, something we toy with, execute or deeply fantasize about, for the right reasons or for all the wrong ones. Jersey Baptism observes the excitement of Guy and Lucy’s escape from their alienated lives in New York City, and depicts whether or not their fantasies of Mexico are convincing, delusional, or somewhere in between. The result I think is a ticking time bomb, an impulsive romance, a sticky love trap that suspends in time, an exposé of self deception and delusion thinly veiled as wishful thinking.
The story picks up on two restless slackers, Guy and Lucy, and their exhilaration, driving uptown through Manhattan as they leave on a road trip to Mexico with their black cat Nori in the backseat.
As they look out the window and drive past people and skyscrapers, they’re reminded of how disgusted they’ve become with their lives in New York- due to what they relay as a city that has pushed them out because of its hyper capitalist materialism. m
Their mutual dissatisfactions escalate their love and connection. This sets the stage for Guy to ask Lucy to turn their vacation into a permanent one. In their minds, a vision grows, where they send their thoughts to far off destinations. What do they have to lose? Can dropping everything and moving to Mexico prove to be the answer they’ve been searching for?
But when Lucy’s black cat Nori goes missing from the car, it sets into motion a chain of events that grinds the trip to a halt.
Lucy goes searching for her cat and Guy goes searching for Lucy, forcing them apart, in the middle of the night in an old, industrial New Jersey town, leading Guy and Lucy on a strange misadventure where private epiphanies force them to re-consider their plans.
