Television Reviews : Elayne Boosler Makes Funny ‘Call’ on Cable

The sight of Elayne Boosler’s dumpy bottom as she pads along her bachelorette apartment in search of something to eat tells us a great deal of the lorn condition of the single woman waiting for Mr. Right.

In “The Call,” which airs tonight at 9:30 on Cinemax, Boosler plays a 30-year-old New York career woman named Samantha who decides to pig out to perdition before she’ll give in to phoning the man who’s supposed to call her for a date. Her nightmarish anxiety grows to feverish proportion. She awakes to find herself transformed into a huge cockroach.

“The Call” is, of course, a comic parable on self-loathing drawn from Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” and although Boosler has overextended herself as writer, director and actress (the short movie has the clunky fitfulness of an experimental student film), she’s often touching and almost always funny in it (as a giant cockroach, what do you wear to the supermarket when you want to buy cake? A drape that looks like a huge babuschka).

The writing is adroit and often smart (particularly in a restaurant scene with two girlfriends and an obtuse waiter), though a saxophone-playing doppelganger hovers in almost every scene like a self-consciously hip ‘50s artifact.

The ending is not Kafkaesque. It is--dare we suggest?--Booslerian. That is to say, one must always live in hope. There’s an affecting moral too, which strongly implies that the ache of loneliness can be a source of strength in recognizing the loneliness in others, however well disguised.

It’s a rare work that can be both funny and wise.