A flash assessment of Gutierrez Mangansakan II‘s “Salome” would merely consider the lapses in its form. Camera work moves mechanically; you can feel the shake of its stiff tripod. The immediate concerns of the characters as academics are isolated and uninteresting, even seeing it as an academic. It is like a “slow cinema” that cuts too often. But the film unfolds gracefully in such a manner that the performances compliment the weight of the subtextual concerns of Mangansakan’s narrative that leads his message to triumph over his medium.
In this film, we follow Andres (Perry Dizon), an art scholar trying to close his long overdue sabbatical so he can write his book. But instead of spending it in his studies, he spent his long-awaited leave trying to recover from a case of alcoholic amnesia. Andres is being haunted by a mysterious feminine figure the moment he falls ill. He is sheltered by his cousin, Christine (Dolly de Leon) in the house left to her by her deceased husband, who was the leader of a religious sect that follows the prophecies of the same feminine figure that Andres saw.
The haunting figure is called Salome (Ram Botero) by the sect, who introduced herself as a chieftain-priestess at the time when the village of Tamontaka was being occupied by the Spanish colonizers. The choice of Tamontaka as the setting is an interesting piece of nugget. Historically, the village was one of the last places in the archipelago that Spain tried to occupy during their reign in the late 1800s, where an experimental Jesuit missionary settlement was made and eventually abandoned. In this sense, Tamontaka is never a stranger to state aggression, struggle against landlessness, and cultural assimilation. These contexts are hinted and sprinkled throughout the film, but is easily lost in the narrative of Salome, who is mostly featured with mystique despite repeated allusions to history. Christine, however, during a conversation with Andres, points out how this context presents a weirdly progressive angle: Salome, a transgender woman, first acknowledged as such by her village and eventually becoming their leader, to being christened as a woman by the colonizers. Botero’s performance here as the mystical priestess warrants serious attention as her very presence, postures, and gazes in the frames she is in thickens its potential meanings.
Engagement with colonialism as an undertone occasionally sinks as we follow Andres. Mangansakan writes him as a very strong character: selfish, rough, whose topical engagements are mostly superficial for as long as it helps with his academic concentration. Andres is a conceited man wrestling against his incapacitated body and mind when he needs them the most. It is only in his encounter with the ghost of Salome that he makes his recovery and relaxes his conceitedness a bit.
Somehow, this conceitedness is also shared by Christine who lives in a house overlooking Tamontaka, as a lord from a tower looking at her subjects during a siesta. Her conversation with Andres about their mortality during an afternoon tea time, at the sight of Tamontaka’s horizon, is never without irony. It is a conversation that can never be taken seriously: a dialogue about dying for art while on their feet, there is a population in danger of being landless.
It is only by taking this irony into account that the truth of “Salome” can be considered, especially when we look at its harrowing and mystifying conclusion. In times of their health and privilege, what is an academic good for? Is it enough to merely converse, discourse, and talk about history? What good is art criticism? After we contextualize art, then what? The film takes the pain of establishing what is plaguing the academic from a personal point only to cancel it out to force into Andres the stake of really engaging with history. His epiphany is expressed not even close to the end when he asks what was his recovery for if he cannot do anything to help.
It takes a different kind of directorial skill to allow the weight of a message to triumph over formal imperfections, and Mangansakan achieves this with finesse. He sidesteps the conventions of an industry too often preoccupied with technical polish, instead allowing the film’s deeper resonance to emerge. In a time when even independent cinema prioritizes aesthetic precision over substance, “Salome” charts a more subversive course. Its quiet, haunting layers speak to something beyond the personal struggles of its protagonist—it taps into a deeper historical wound, a lingering echo of colonial oppression. Through the spectral presence of Salome, a symbol of defiance against both local and foreign powers, the film challenges its characters—and its viewers—to engage with the past in a way that demands action, not just reflection.
