Girl 6 (Spike Lee, 1996)

Watched again at a time when questions of representation and inclusion only swirl more urgently, Spike Lee’s Girl 6 is as intriguing and evasive as ever, a film of finely seductive, sensuous presence (happily aided by a heavy Prince presence on the soundtrack), built on long-established absences. It follows a young actress, Judy (although we only learn that name in the final minutes), who out of economic necessity becomes a phone sex operator, where “Girl 6” is her ID; she starts to relish her popularity and her relationships with some recurring callers, putting her sense of boundaries at risk. Theresa Randle is sensational in the lead role, conveying all the character’s specific insecurities while evoking a more classical, timeless mystique; the movie includes imagined sequences in which she’s dropped into The Jeffersons, Foxy Brown, or Carmen Jones, as Dorothy Dandridge, each of these serving both as celebration and as an underlining of the limited coordinates of female black stardom. Dandridge seems to constitute a particular preoccupation – the kind of pioneering icon to which an actress might aspire, but whose career was hampered by cruel lack of possibilities - and by bookending the film with two auditions at which Judy is treated largely as a piece of flesh, Lee pointedly resists the sense of growth and evolution that often attends such stories. As with the somewhat related Bamboozled, an almost hallucinatory quality intercedes in the closing stretch, and the final shot could be taken as much as a portent of future anonymity than as one of triumph. Halle Berry briefly appears at herself, a few years before building on Dandridge’s status as the first black woman to be nominated for the best actress Oscar by becoming the first black woman to win it (and the only one to date) – it’s a coincidence that fittingly underlines the sense of confinement and restriction (as does Randle’s near-disappearance from movies for the last decade).