Spike’s Girl Randle Shines In Sassy Role As A Phone-Sex Operator In ‘Girl 6’
“Girl 6,” the new film from Spike Lee, is a comedy in the same sense that Voltaire’s “Candide” is a comedy: The story is more concerned with laughing at society than with encouraging society to laugh at it.
The situations play amusingly because they hit close to where many of us live.
“Girl 6” also offers a compelling test-of-innocence story: It threatens a likable, widely identifiable protagonist with corruption, even as it gives her the opportunity to rise above it and triumph.
Theresa Randle, last seen in the underappreciated drug-racketeer drama “Sugar Hill” (1994), is Girl 6, a perhaps too-enthusiastic employee of a phone-sex service. Names are irrelevant in this dehumanizing racket: Though the employees make decent wages and are treated cordially by their bosses, everyone has a number.
The character wasn’t always in this business. She is a frustrated actor, but her frustrations get the better of her during the film’s first reel, when a hot-shot screen director (Quentin Tarantino, playing a caricature of himself) orders her to disrobe for a tryout.
Randle is terrific in this showy role, whether the character is struggling to make ends meet or imagining herself in a variety of fantasy roles. Some of the better moments involve her daydreams - doing a dead-on-the-money impersonation of Dorothy Dandridge in “Carmen Jones” (1954), enacting a parody of TV’s “The Jeffersons,” and so forth.
Screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks makes much of exposing the phone-fantasy game as a serious endeavor for only its pathetic customers. Girl 6 and her colleagues know better than to confuse the role-playing with real life, although Girl 6 must at length forget that the real reason she has joined the scam is to raise enough money to leave New York.
Her crisis of conscience also triggers something resembling mortal peril, as a threatening caller learns too much about her and attempts to come nearer than just a phone call. Director Lee wisely resists lapsing into thriller territory here, however, and remains focused on Randle’s moral and emotional dilemma. A subplot about an injured child provides a helpful emotional anchor.
Lee himself is a welcome screen presence as a sports-obsessed neighbor, and Isaiah Washington is memorable as Randle’s former husband, a professional shoplifter who would like to resume their relationship. Name-brand cameos in addition to Tarantino include Halle Berry, Madonna, John Turturro and Ron Silver. The film’s full-circle finale offers a grim reminder that the grass might even be browner on the opposite side of the fence.
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: “GIRL 6” Locations: Lyons. Credits: Directed by Spike Lee; starring Theresa Randle, Spike Lee, Isaiah Washington, Debi Mazar, Madonna, John Turturro, Quentin Tarantino, Ron Silver Running time: 1:49