GIRL 6
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1996) ** (out of four)
Ten years ago with SHE'S GOTTA HAVE IT, his first film, Spike Lee made a critically-acclaimed movie about a woman who wanted sex without commitment. Now, with GIRL 6, he tells the story of a woman who wants sex without physical contact. Played by Theresa Randle, the main character is a struggling actress who is trying to break into film but finds it impossible to get a decent role she doesn't have to take her clothes off for.
Apparently, Randle herself didn't have this conviction, for even in the scene in which Lee is trying to show the corruption of the movie business in taking tits over talent by having guest star Quentin Tarantino (as "QT," the hottest director in Hollywood) force Randle to expose her breasts in an audition, Lee has her appear topless. If this isn't the irony of ironies, I don't know what is.
Randle can't find a decent acting job, so she decides to settle for another type of acting -- phone sex. She makes her rounds of the New York phone entertainment scene, including a Bell brothel headed up by Madonna, who tells Randle a typical phone sex conversation may include "toilet training, bestiality, foot fetishes, butt plugs, three ways, five ways, six ways..." Coincidentally, those seven things are all on Madonna's "To Do" list most days.
Randle eventually becomes Girl 6 at an upscale phone sex operation, where the operators are model-gorgeous women worth paying five bucks a minute for. Naomi Campbell is even one of the phone operators, seen wearing a t-shirt inscribed "Models Suck" (but let's leave what they have to do to get their contracts out of this). I'm pretty sure Lee's view of the women behind the phones isn't quite as accurate as the Aerosmith "Sweet Emotion" video, where the obese housewife with a crying baby on her shoulder did the chores while seducing horny guys on the phone.
Girl 6 finds she does a pretty good job of getting men off, from her dominatrix character April to girl-next-door Lovely. Soon she finds herself enjoying the power she has over men and the no-strings-attached thrill of it all. She slowly begins to withdraw from the real world and into the phone sex one, while her close friend Spike Lee and ex-husband-but-still-in-love-with-her Isaiah Washington grow more and more concerned about her.
Even though almost all the beautiful women working there are black (with the exception of the absolutely sexy Kristen Wilson), they're instructed to identify themselves as white unless someone requests another slice of the racial pie. But we're constantly reminded of Girl 6's race by her intrusive fantasies, where she pictures herself in the role of great black women through entertainment history, from Foxy Brown to Thelma on "The Jeffersons." (Seeing Spike Lee play George Jefferson is well worth the price of the video rental.)
Those scenes, and many others in this 108-minute movie, are needless padding that bring the movie down. GIRL 6 starts out a decent movie, and some of the early phone sex scenes are simultaneously hilarious and fascinating, but the movie crashes and burns fast, leaving a surreal climax and about fifteen boring minutes after that. The entire time, old and new Prince songs play constantly in the background, from opening credits to end credits. The last lyric before the fade-to-credits is something like, "Nothing good lasts forever," which describes GIRL 6 all too well.
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