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cealchylle
Reviews
Girl 6 (1996)
A magnificent film
I can't help but to be amused by the other comments/reviews on this movie. They (even the positive ones) completely enforce exactly what this movie is actively trying to point out about our society.
Several people noted that the narrative was weak or nonexistent, that the film didn't "go" anywhere, and/or that there was too much extra "stuff" that distracted the story from the "real" plot line. I'm here to tell you that this is the whole point of Spike Lee's brilliant Girl 6. It's not a flaw in the movie, it is part of it's very construction.
Every time an extradiegetic scene was placed within the overall plot (such as the Dorothy Dandridge, Foxy Brown, Jeffersons scenes as well as the recurring image of the elevator shaft) the audience is pulled away from the narrative of the film and forced to see it as such: a movie! And fictional movies have no basis in reality; the people and actions depicted are not real. This disrupts our normal expectations about what we expect to see in a film.
The movie is also scattered with touches of reflexivity. For example, Naomi Campbell, wearing a shirt that says "Models Suck" and Quentin Tarantino, acting very ironically in a way he has been accused of. At the end, the movie theater in L.A. is showing a movie entitled "Girl 6" and a billboard proclaims that it's "The End." Absolutely all of this is purposeful and calculated. It does exactly what so many people were disappointed not to see, by subverting our expectations and implicitely pointing out that this is NOT a movie you can just "fall into" and become a passive spectator, that it actively engages the audience and breaks down our concepts of the master narrative by giving us an ending we did not expect.
Girl 6 is not a movie about phone sex, as so many of you seem to believe. It is a feminist (if you know anything about Suzan-Lori Parks, you know she would never condone something sexist, let alone write it) film that deliberately references itself in order to subvert our expectations about films, society, and women.
It's really a shame that so many people are, in fact, so hooked on "traditional" forms of narrative (taught by a sexist society) that they fail to see the value of this film.