FILMS ANSWER THE (TELEPHONE) CALL : INTIMACY-STARVED CHARACTERS FINDING EMOTIONS ON THE LINE.

Byline: Stephen Holden The New York Times

The funniest running joke in ``Denise Calls Up,'' Hal Salwen's clever new satire about a yuppie social circle that communicates entirely by telephone, computer and fax machine, is the ``affair'' of two telecommunications workers.

Jerry (Liev Schreiber) and Barbara (Caroleen Feeney) are introduced over the telephone by their mutual friend Gale (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson), in the film that opens Friday.

The two proceed to carry on a wary courtship in which every busy signal, hang-up, pause and call-waiting beep is analyzed for its tiniest significance.

The relationship is eventually consummated in a hilarious long-distance encounter in which they whisper about how hot and humid it is in their respective rooms and Barbara, who pretends she is wearing a red silk teddy, seductively suggests that ``too much moisture is bad for the electronic equipment.''

Parodying soft-core porn films, the camera moves in and intercuts between the two as they languidly trail their telephone receivers across their bodies and wind their limbs through their spiraling telephone cords.

But the affair soon goes sour. Jerry angrily confides to his best friend that he suspects Barbara of ``faking it'' and admits he has begun ``faking it back.'' Their affair has degenerated into ``moan, groan, dial tone.''

Telephone sex and the confusion between real and fake are also the subject of Spike Lee's agile new comedy, ``Girl 6.'' The movie's title character (Theresa Randle), an aspiring actress who is sick and tired of being asked to bare her breasts at every audition, takes a job at a telephone sex service and soon becomes its most popular draw.

As a sexy voice without a face, Girl 6 discovers a dramatic latitude that even in the best of circumstances she would not enjoy as a screen or television actress, partly because she is black.

Fantasy sequences in which Randle dons assorted wigs to parody scenes from ``Carmen Jones,'' ``Foxy Brown'' and a television sitcom that is a hybrid of ``Good Times'' and ``The Jeffersons'' pointedly address the dearth of good roles for black women in movies and television. Moreover, what parts there are tend to be stereotypes.

As a telephone sex worker, Girl 6 can transcend race, genre and sexual taste and be all things to all people. The feeling of power she gleans from the job goes to her head, and for a time she becomes addicted to her occupation.

In particular she is drawn to one client, Bob (Peter Berg), who calls regularly from Arizona. His mother, he tells her, is dying of cancer, and he needs her moral support.

Girl 6 becomes so emotionally attached to Bob that when he tells her he is flying to New York on business, they make a date to meet at a bench on the Coney Island boardwalk. Her fantasy balloon bursts when he doesn't show up.

Dark humor about sex and the telephone goes back as far as Joan Didion's novel ``Play It As It Lays,'' in which neglected Hollywood wives joked bitterly about absent husbands who ``give good phone.''

The rise of the phone-sex industry has since inspired the phone-sex novel, Nicholson Baker's ``Vox'' in 1992. Who can forget Jennifer Jason Leigh in Robert Altman's 1993 film ``Short Cuts,'' absent-mindedly mumbling dirty talk while she's changing her baby's diapers.

Last fall, ``1-900,'' a phone-sex movie by the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, opened in New York. And ``The Truth About Cats and Dogs,'' which opens later this month, adds an amusing phone-sex twist to the Cyrano story.

Both ``Denise Calls Up'' and ``Girl 6'' are critiques of telephone sex that look past the titillating aspects of the subject to offer a broader critique of the ways technology, by mediating interpersonal communication, confuses people about what is real and what is not.

Girl 6 foolishly imagines that her commercial relationship is a genuine love connection. When the title character of ``Denise Calls Up'' (Alanna Ubach) telephones Martin (Dan Gunther), a total stranger who impregnated her with his donated sperm, and tells him he's going to be a father, he explodes in ecstatic self-congratulation. Under the circumstances, his joy seems ludicrously narcissistic.

In the movie's darkest running joke, Martin and his fellow yuppies are ultimately too self-absorbed (``deluged'' and ``besieged'' by work is how they prefer to put it) to ever get together.

In the opening scene, one woman is tossing out the hors d'oeuvres from a party the night before that no one attended. Other events for which the characters promise to appear but fail to show up include a funeral, a birth and a New Year's Eve party. They would all rather be at home playing with their computers and chatting over the phone.

Both movies portray a society in which people use the available technology to flee intimacy, while deluding themselves that it is improving their connections with one another.

Where Lee's film is generous toward most of its characters, Salwen's is as nasty as it is funny.

``Denise Calls Up'' is particularly cruel to one character who dies in a car accident and whose final words, spoken into her car phone, are recorded on a friend's answering machine along with her final screams.

The screenplay goes out of its way to provide a grisly description of her dead body with half the head gone and the telephone receiver lodged in her brain.

Ultimately these characters' concern for one another seems almost as false as the concern registered by a television news reader describing the day's latest murders.

What's sad and eerie about this up-to-the-minute satire is that its characters are unaware of the fact a telephone call isn't the same thing as being there. And they are much the worse off for not knowing the difference.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) Alanna Ubach is the title character in ``Deni se Calls Up,'' a satirical look at a group of friends who think it's their busy lives preventing them from getting together - except over the phone, computer and fax machine.

(2) Theresa Randle's out-of-work actress finds her calling as a phone sex operator in ``Girl 6.''