Girl 6 (Theresa Randle) is having trouble making it as an actress. Her drama coach is dropping her because she can't afford her fees, and her agent is dropping her because she was reluctant to show her breasts to a director (Quentin Tarantino, by the way) during an audition. (This point might be more believable if, in a scene straight out of Fame, she didn't indeed expose her breasts and if, as a friend pointed out, her breasts weren't so obviously augmented.) For the dough, she takes a job as a phone sex provider where she's given the nom de guerre "Girl 6." Unfortunately, she takes to it a little too well and her grasp on reality starts slipping--she's become personally involved in her phone relationships. She has, as the other girls put it, let the job "go to her head."

Rather than telling this story in a linear way, Girl 6 presents a collection of scenes that could be shuffled and rearranged without grave damage to the whole. This in itself isn't necessarily such a bad thing--after all, film began as a non-narrative medium and experimental filmmakers have continued the tradition. There have even been some commercially successful non-linear films like Slacker and Annie Hall. Girl 6, though, can't quite jettison the idea of plot the way Slacker did. Instead, Lee adopts a baroque filmmaking style that lays a hazy dream-like structure side by side with the conventional trappings of a plot.

The blend of dream and reality at least gives Spike Lee a chance to show his stuff, and his stuff, to be fair, is brilliant. Girl 6 has elaborate fantasies--generally involving a phone--where she's a hero in a '70s blacksploitation flick, or a character on The Jeffersons. Lee's uncannily astute recreation of these scenes are hilarious. Whenever Girl 6 slips into fantasy, Lee uses some kind of weird film stock or processing that gives these sequences a blurred, oversaturated look; or, as in Crooklyn, he uses an anamorphic lens to stretch the picture out. The movie looks great. Lee is one of the few commercial directors around willing to take visual risks, and you just can't argue with the energy and beauty of his filmmaking.

But the form seems to have been achieved at the expense of content--and the content is, to put it mildly, problematic. First of all, the characters are drawn so inconsistently that Girl 6 is telling off a sleazy grocer one minute and letting a customer named "Snuff" abuse her the next. Then there's the babe problem. The movie-within-a-movie structure of Girl 6 suggests that the story we're hearing is that of Girl 6 herself--her tale, her warped reality, her fantasies of stardom. But in one telling detail, all the phone sex girls are gorgeous; like, Naomi Campbell and Madonna gorgeous. Theresa Randle herself is one exceptionally hot fox who just happens to wear skimpy clothes to work. I mean, come on: Whose fantasy is this?

It's interesting to compare Girl 6 to another, lesser known film about sex work, Lizzie Borden's Working Girls, a low-budget, unsentimental look at a single day in a house of prostitution in New York. It has virtually no plot and plays like a documentary. The women are ordinary looking; the work seems hard and annoying and completely routine. The prostitutes aren't presented as sinners or saints--they're simply doing a job. Working Girls is interesting because it's one of the few representations of sex work on film that's completely devoid of judgment, titillation, or romantic notions.

Girl 6, on the other hand, gives us the straight male fantasy of what a sex worker is like--beautiful, lonely and emotionally involved in the task. Furthermore, the film buys into the old-fashioned idea that sexuality without love is harmful, and that (unmarried) women who are too sexual will be punished. As Girl 6 becomes more involved in phone sex, things start going downhill for her. Men start harassing her. She becomes obsessed with an "8-year-old little girl," as the newscasters so redundantly put it, who has fallen down an elevator shaft. Whenever Girl 6 is having a bad day, Lee treats us to a zooming shot down the shaft--as if Girl 6 were herself a hurt little girl, or a fallen woman. At last she quits her job and goes to give the girl some money. She finds her in the park, next to her mother, who is reading the Bible. Yes, the Bible. Girl 6 gives her some money and floats away, all cleansed or something.

Somehow I find this lesson on sin and redemption particularly offensive coming from a progressive filmmaker like Lee. Can't he find something better to do than dress up sexist religious notions and parade them around for an hour and a half?