GIRL 6 (1996)
(I generally avoid giving information about key plot points in these reviews. Those colourful folks on the interweb who speak fluent modern computer gibberish in lieu of the English language refer to these as “spoilers”. Up until comparatively recent times, the only “Spoiler” I was aware of was a masked pro wrestler of some decades ago, but as far as I remember, his specialty was the claw hold and not so much movie reviews. Anyway, discussing this movie seemed to necessitate disclosing some details of the storyline, so if that’s likely to affect your enjoyment of Girl 6 down the track, you probably want to give this one a miss.)
This movie closes with a shot of the main character (Theresa Randle) looking across a busy Hollywood street where she (and we) view a movie marquee bearing the title of this picture. The shot then broadens out to include a large sign which says “The End”. It’s actually kind of a satisfying “clever” gimmick ending for a few seconds, right up until you realise Jerry Lewis ended at least two of his movies with pretty much the same kind of gimmick three decades earlier. In each case, the director is telling you “Movie over – back to reality”, or “You have just been watching a movie”. I guess this is handy just in case you thought you’d fallen through a hole in space-time continuity and were now living in a different dimension, or if you’d got confused or forgetful and thought you were knitting or playing ping pong instead of watching a movie.
When Jerry Lewis does this, it tells us nothing about the content of the movies whatsoever, which contain the usual amount of mugging and what, in ancient reviewer-speak, used to be termed “pratfalls”, along with the whole saccharine ambush business of Jerry winding up with the pretty lady. It’s a guy looking for a sharp, impressive “modern” way of withdrawing from the picture, and that’s about the whole business right there. *
In Spike Lee’s case, he’s trying to make a point. Of course. It’s back to reality for both the viewer and the lead character, and an attempt to semaphore both that we have been voyeurs complicit in the sexual exploitation Theresa Randle’s character has (been) submitted to (the old Hitchcock routine) **; and to inoculate the viewer with the notion that Spike has treated us to a heavy dose of reality here. I don’t know what the unders/overs are on that bet, but I’m willing to take the point-spread that he didn’t get there.
Theresa Randle plays an actress who can’t get a break, and is struggling for a buck, which she demonstrates by wearing different flashy designer outfits in every new scene, some of which are such a big deal that they get their own separate screen credits after the movie. For someone who states numerous times that she is struggling for rent and food money, she must be one heck of a keen-eyed bargain shopper.
She stumbles into a job as a phone sex provider, dubbed “Girl 6”, for which she turns out to have a remarkable aptitude. This naturally occurs in the most picturesque, clean office setting with the best employer and working conditions in sex industry history. Hey, stop jolting us with all that devastating reality stuff, Mr L.
She gets addicted to the process, and there seems to be a dark fatalistic drift towards an apparently inevitable Looking for Mr Goodbar type conclusion, until either the scriptwriter (Suzan Lori-Partridge, sorry, “Lori-Parks”) or the director lose the heart to pull the trigger, and instead have her get a nasty scare that wakes her up, and she moves to LA and goes right back to her plans of being a regular-style actress instead of the kind who lies to men about their penis-size over the phone while reading aluminium siding brochures.
That’s pretty much the whole movie. While we’re meant to think the whole phone sex deal was a way of Girl 6 defining both her limitations and real ambitions, and discovering something essential about herself, you’d be forgiven for feeling that she could have skipped the whole episode, gone straight to LA and continued with her struggling actress career straight away, thus cutting down the movie to a tidy five minutes including opening and closing credits, and without losing anything vital in terms of character development.
Because it spends so much time and effort foreshadowing an ending that never happens, Girl 6 is left as a set of scenes laid end to end without a centre.
The main character tends to unfurl in the same direction. Theresa Randle can be terrific being appealing, or harried, or sexy, or a sarcastic foil for her real best friend and fellow lonesome loser back at the apartment block (played by Spike Lee), but at no time is it possible to buy that these are all the same character. She’s likeable, and looks just wonderful in all those shatteringly expensive-looking outfits that are apparently readily accessible to those on a pliers-grip tight budget, and I didn’t really want to see her get it in the neck either, but none of that adds up to a character that holds the attention or a complete movie.
What’s good here is that Spike Lee can tell a story with a camera – or at least communicate a scene – with the facility of a Steven Spielberg, and generally with a fair bit more style. Whether he actually says anything in particular with that style is another argument.
It makes me think of how he uses the late 60s/early 70s style overlapping dialogue throughout the scenes in the phone sex office. He does it great, but it doesn’t communicate anything in particular. I mean, we already knew that a lot of people would be talking at once in such an office.
In Robert Altman’s MASH, this technique says something about the disjunctive reality of the situation, and in that and other pictures of the time there’s a jolt of perceived reality in there – hey, that’s how people talk in real life, and never did in the movies. In George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck, it at least conveyed the sense of a busy and sometimes frenzied TV news office.
In Girl 6, we don’t achieve any greater perspective on the phone sex business or the characters – we just hear an elegantly multi-tracked mix of the employees purveying various perversions. And it’s all so neatly and soothingly done that even if the overlapping dialogue had had something specific to say about phone sex – and as far as I’m concerned, no such comment is readily detectable – the downright smooth and seductive sound of it probably would have undercut any message intended anyway.
That’s what I’m getting at with the Spike Lee technique, as opposed to when he’s just flat-out storytelling. It doesn’t always seem to have any direct connection to the story he’s trying to tell or the points he’s trying to make. It’s just there. In this case you end up with something easy to watch, but you’re not quite sure why you had to watch it.
But any movie which starts off with cameos by Quentin Tarantino and John Turturro in the first two scenes is never going to be all bad. You probably have to stick with this for five minutes just to see Turturro as Randle’s agent. His comedy wig gives the performance of the movie. Tarantino is funny sending himself up as a complete asshole. This routine probably would have sat better in a Larry Sanders episode than Girl 6, but you’ll be glad it’s there.
Also wandering off anything resembling the main branch of the film are some fantasy scenes, where Randle imagines herself in various African-American movie and television roles of the past. She does Dorothy Dandridge as Carmen (a demographic brain-explosion of a specific reference that must have been lost on at least 75% of movie-goers in 1996), Foxy Brown from the blaxploitation cycle of movies in the early 70s, and joins with Spike for a spirited recreation of the sitcom The Jeffersons. ***
I have no idea what these scenes are doing in this movie, but once again, you’ll be glad they’re there.
Madonna is also in there, in a small but memorable role, playing a hard-nosed owner of both a pole-dancing bar and an alternative (and dangerous) phone sex operation. She’s actually very good. Don’t know if she had any clue that her participation in this role tends to come over as a pointed if not vicious satire of her former real life role of hustling her own sexuality on a showbiz retail basis for money (and whatever effect the prominence of such pointy-bra and five-star underwear flavoured marketing would have had on the overall perception of female roles in society, and all that jazz.) Don’t know for sure that’s what Spike Lee necessarily had in mind neither. But the casting of such a role in a movie that strives so irritatingly hard to make points about sexual exploitation, female sexual roles, etc was always going to beg that particular awkward question. ****
Spike Lee is his own best actor as usual. He plays the usual, overly talkative, pushy, nerdy character who has an unexpected sideline in devastatingly shrewd one-liners. (Well, it’s not exactly unexpected at this stage of the game, but you get what I mean.) Isaiah Washington’s character of the screw-up former boyfriend is a cipher as written, and there’s nothing he can do with it. Michael Imperioli (Chris in The Sopranos) registers mightily in a nasty little role as a potential stalker, but much like the other somewhat disturbing male-caller character of “Bob Regular” (Peter Berg) – and the Isaiah Washington character for that matter – he both appears and disappears from the movie on an apparent whim.
For a movie which plays so much on the idea of making the audience voyeurs and sexual exploiters as well, and stridently if fitfully tries to nailgun us with various points about such exploitation, it also appears to be dealing from a badly stacked deck. When Quentin Tarantino playing sleazy director Quentin Tarantino insists on our heroine exposing her breasts at an audition because this is “essential” to the movie he’s going to make, and she is embarrassed, angry and disappointed, but shows them anyway, we don’t really have to see them. They could have shown her disrobing from behind, shown only her face, cut it how they liked, and we still would have known exactly what was going on, without seeing one naked square centimetre of Randle’s torso. But B’DOING-B’DOING, there they are, right in screen-centre where everyone can get a good eyeful. Oh, ok, and WE’RE meant to be the perverts here. Riiiiight. The moral apparently is that sometimes when you stack a deck badly enough, you can wind up cheating yourself.
Similarly, every time Girl 6 heads out to work, she’s in another incendiary arrangement of physique-clamping couture to the point where, even if Mr Magoo was in the vicinity, he couldn’t possibly mistake her for his nephew Waldo, or a handy passing gorilla. What, she forgets on a daily basis that she’s working in phone sex, rather than the traditional full-contact NCAA-style variety? Even if this is meant to make some point about her increasing addiction to her line of work, or her waywardly-blooming sexual persona or whatever the deal would be, the point’s blown because she’s dressing like that pretty much from Day One anyway.
Girl 6 is kind of an elegant mess of a picture that changes its mind about where it’s going on pretty much every level, heads off boldly in a wide variety of directions and then winds up back where it started without quite convincing you that it’s ever gone anywhere at all. Perhaps because of the subject matter – both thematically and, regarding Lee’s handling of NYC, visually, perhaps because of Theresa Randle or Spike Lee (on screen), and definitely because of some wayward but enjoyable cameos and vignettes, it holds the attention. And once it’s got it, it has no apparent earthly idea of what to do with it.
(6 out of 11 on the time-honoured MPHOAH scale)
* (You could argue that, at least in The Bellboy, it’s a comment on the movie-making process, which is valid in that Jerry, realising there was a hole in the release schedule for Jerry Lewis material that summer, took himself and a camera crew off to the Fontainebleau [that’s how they spell it] Hotel in Miami Beach and basically improvised himself a movie in a couple of weeks, along the lines of how the old silent comedians used to work. Given that, in watching The Bellboy, the process of how the movie was made is arguably more interesting than anything by way of content, it seems harsh to carp too much about a gimmick ending that at least nominally comments on that process.)
** (The most definitive use of this device perhaps can be seen in Michael Powell’s early 60s movie Peeping Tom, in which the disturbed killer is a voyeur who films as he kills, and we are uncomfortably subjected to the same viewpoint as he during the murders.)
*** (This sequence with The Jeffersons gets a separate editing credit which is just as odd as the specific credits for individual garments. Even more odd, the editing in this skit is extremely confusing, and actually detracts from the humour and the sitcom recreation look. It’s like someone from the Natural Born Killers crew took over directing halfway through a Saturday Night Live episode.)
**** (This casting manoeuvre seems eerily reminiscent of various past examples of Woody Allen casting pointedly if not nastily to type, which doesn’t seem entirely impossible since Lee is such an obvious fan of the later, unfunnier Woody Allen movies. The Allen examples that come immediately to mind are a cameo by Daryl Hannah playing a statuesque blonde at a party who is casually revealed as a vapid, nothing-to-say airhead, and Alan Alda cast hilariously as a cheesy, weaselling, fatuous, pretentious dolt. Of course, the possibility absolutely exists that the directors had no such intentions whatsoever, and were merely helping out friends/colleagues they liked and respected with a part in their movies. Tell you what - you watch the films concerned, and you decide.
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