With the exception of Malcolm X and Clockers, Spike Lee’s films have been cinematic collages, with vibrant scenes of African-American life edited together into a unique, organic pastiche. A good story, well told, has generally not been Lee’s way. Rather, he makes movies the way a good horn player blows jazz, picking out a theme and working the harmonic variations. Sometimes what results is dissonant, sometimes it’s sweet. On the whole, Lee’s postmodern combination of words, pictures and music has always been interesting—until Girl 6, Lee’s latest, least film.
A semi-comedy about the world of phone sex, Girl 6 actively courts the loose, scattershot, jazzy style of such Lee pictures as Jungle Fever, School Daze and She’s Gotta Have It (which is actually quoted in the new movie). But where those earlier films had passion and ideas, Girl 6 offers only vague titillation and suggestion. The film never gets to any point or explores any theme in depth; it’s the first Spike Lee movie that’s not really about anything.
Young actress Theresa Randle plays Judy, an aspiring New York actress failing in the thespian arts, presumably because she has too much dignity to exploit herself. (This conviction apparently isn’t shared by Randle, who removes her top in the movie’s first five minutes.) To finance a move to L.A., our heroine takes a job as a pseudonymous operator, Girl 6, at a surprisingly bright and friendly phone-sex agency. On the job, the other operators distract themselves with hobbies—some sketch, some knit, some study—but Girl 6 uses her telephone time to hone her acting skills. Ultimately, she gets so deeply into the phone fantasies that for the first time she finds her acting “center.”
This rather thin plot is beefed up with a handful of worthy scenes. The conversations between Randle and her deadbeat, sports-collectible-mad neighbor (played by Lee) have a low-key affability. And there’s something intriguing going on whenever Girl 6 fields a call—the customers are shot on video, and they practically never engage in the activity one might expect from lonely, horny guys calling a phone sex line. Between the unfilmic look and the unbelievable action, a dreamlike intensity emerges, especially during the fantasies about sports and high school. For these few fleeting moments, Girl 6 seems on the verge of saying something about male fantasies and their preoccupation with power over sex.
That would have been an interesting theme, but Lee doesn’t explore it. The movie also lays a solid framework for examining performance and personae, especially as related to African-Americans trying to get along in a white-dominated world. But Lee shrugs that off too. Instead, he opts for the ridiculous, playing up the oddball aspects of callers’ fantasies instead of plumbing them for meaning. This turns out to be a disastrous mistake: The behavior in the film isn’t realistic or well-observed enough to be funny. Because Lee expects the humor to carry the film, Girl 6 becomes pathetically unentertaining.
Sadly, the miscues don’t stop there. The movie periodically slips into parodies of Carmen Jones, Foxy Brown and The Jeffersons for no apparent reason. These aren’t sexual fantasies, and they aren’t demonstrations of Judy’s (or even Randle’s) acting skill: They’re just useless diversions. And the soundtrack, which consists of old and new tunes by Prince, is more often distracting than affecting—particularly for viewers familiar with the songs in question, who may legitimately wonder why Lee uses them as he does. Why does the protest song “Sign o’ the Times” play during a bathroom conversation? Why does the spiritual “The Cross” underscore Girl 6’s talk with an angry client?
Still other elements seem to have fallen from the tree before they were fully ripe. A subplot about a little girl who falls down an elevator shaft eventually intersects with the main plot, but not meaningfully. A potential relationship between Girl 6 and a customer from Arizona comes to nothing. For a time, a tense scenario between Girl 6 and a caller threatens to erupt into real violence, but the situation never even approaches a climax. Unlike Girl 6, the plot threads never make a single connection.
A disappointment like Girl 6 is useful, inasmuch as it brings into sharp relief Spike Lee’s better days. Watching Girl 6, I thought about the brilliant vignettes that have highlighted Lee’s other sketchbook movies: the confrontation between students and townies in School Daze, the boy who skips his dad’s recital for a basketball game in Crooklyn, the bickering bandmates in Mo’ Better Blues, the detailed numbers racket in Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop, the literally riotous street-corner debates in Do the Right Thing. What these scenes have in common is a remarkable sensitivity to truthful interactions between people we rarely see on the screen. It’s this commitment to showing what others do not that makes Spike Lee invaluable, and it’s what’s missing from Girl 6 (save the scenes that feature Lee’s sad-eyed baseball-card collector).
When Girl 6 ended, I realized for the first time that my two favorite Spike Lee films are still Malcolm X and Clockers, which combine Lee’s sensitivity and often dazzling technique with coherent storytelling. That trumps free association any day of the week. Girl 6 is the nadir of Lee’s career thus far, but perhaps it will lead him to think about where he can go from here. Maybe he just needs to put down the phone and free up his hands. —Noel Murray
French Disconnection
Mike Nichols has called the plot of La Cage aux Folles the most perfect piece of farcical machinery ever devised. For thrillers, the plot of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1955 shocker Diabolique works just as smashingly. A murder, a body that won’t stay put, a big dark house filled with suggestive shadows—what more ideal setup could you want from a scareshow? The movie terrified American audiences in the ’50s, and until Psycho, which borrowed some of its terror tactics, it was widely regarded as the scariest movie ever made. So efficient is Clouzot’s contraption, even after 40 years, that the hair-raising climax caused one woman to have an anxiety attack at a Sarratt screening last fall.
The problem with a near-perfect machine, however, is that a lot of unskilled tinkerers will get an itch to perfect it. Consequently, the world has endured four decades of overblown Diabolique imitations—all more violent and explicit, none as insinuating or effective. The latest better mousetrap to snap shut on its creators’ fingers is Diabolique, a direct remake that isn’t half as lively as its fidgety corpse.
The 1996-model Diabolique retains virtually every scene from the original, right down to the establishing shots. Thus we have Isabelle Adjani and Sharon Stone as the long-suffering wife and mistress of brutish schoolmaster Chazz Palminteri, who shows up in more movies these days than Pepsi. When the tyrant pushes the women too far, they decide to bump him off—only to discover he might not be as easy to kill as they suspected.
The suspense of Clouzot’s film comes from cold existential logic: If you decide to kill someone, you must live (or die) with the consequences. The agent of retribution in the 1955 version isn’t God but a wily detective, who steps in to restore order and mete out justice. In the remake, this stern moral code is replaced with a kind of woozy fake feminism: The killing is OK because the man is worse than the women, and the detective (here played by Kathy Bates with sneaky aplomb) is there only for validation. That the tone has been changed from pulpy dread to campy black humor doesn’t help. The director, Jeremiah Chechik, navigates the plot twists without confidence or imagination: The big scare scenes, which are already familiar, are drawn out rather than speeded along, and the original’s classically simple denouement turns into a series of ineffectual whammies.
The one unequivocal bright spot, apart from Bates, is Sharon Stone’s hilariously nasty performance as the hard-bitten mistress. Poured into hideous skin-tight outfits, Stone sashays from calamity to calamity with imperious contempt: She droops a cigarette from her snarled lips as if she can’t even work up the enthusiasm to hold it straight. Poor Isabelle Adjani, by comparison, has little to do but simper, and the uninspired cinematography makes her luminous round face look like a mushroom.
The impulse to remake foreign classics with American actors is always curious. Why bother, especially when the originals remain so vivid (and so easily accessible)? Will they somehow be improved by a simple change of location or language, when so much of their greatness depends on cultural nuances? The new Diabolique turns a gripping examination of guilt into a tacky B-movie in borrowed finery. It loses everything in translation.—Jim Ridley
