Liezel Fernando (Quinn Carrillo) decided to leave her parents' store in Cebu to spread her wings in the city. She worked as a sales agent for the Candi Realty company selling condominiums. Driven and ambitious, even became their top agent. She used her paycheck to buy the signature brand luxury items she always longed for. However, she has lost her sales magic, is currently on a slump and was about to lose her job.
One day, a new girl, Susan Rivera (Rob Guinto), was hired as sales agent. Shy and unassuming, even admitting difficulty in speaking in English, Susan surprised everyone by attracting several male buyers and selling them condos one after the other in no time. Intrigued and annoyed by Susan's immediate success, Liezel stalked her and soon discovered Susan's secret brand of "sales talk."
Quinn Carrillo adds another Vivamax erotic film under her belt as screen writer, after "Biyak," "Tahan" and "The Influencer," all produced and shown this year. While she was also in the cast of all these films she wrote, "Showroom" is the first one in which she took on the lead role. With all the seven capital sins in her seriously-flawed persona, her Liezel was as anti-hero as it gets. Carrillo could have attacked this role with more depth than camp.
Rob Guinto played down her glamorous look and came off credibly as a single mother down on her luck. Her Susan was a desperate woman offering irresistible freebies to her customers in order to close deals and raise funds for the surgery of her "sickly" daughter (played by a very healthy-looking child actress). A clean-cut Kit Thompson was miscast as Liezel's loyal friend and was almost inconsequential, until he later fell for her nemesis.
Susan actually asked Liezel in two scenes (with almost exactly the same dialog) why Liezel simply won't get off her case and was doggedly determined to push her under the bus. Carrillo should not assume that audiences of this film only care about the sex scenes (Carrillo and Guinto certainly had a revolving door of male partners here) and won't care about the logic of her character's nefarious yet nebulous motivation. (Ok, they probably won't.)
Director Carlo Obispo built his career crafting sensitive films about children, like "Purok 7" (2013), "Gasping for Air" (2016) and just recently, the Cinemalaya 2022 Best Picture "The Baseball Player" (2022). It boggles the mind why Obispo would even consider to include a film like "Showroom" in his filmography. Whether it was to expand his repertoire or just for a quickie paycheck, it will always stick out like a sore thumb. 1/10.
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