Madonna’s triumphs at the peaks of music charts weren’t matched, to put it extremely mildly, with her acting career. While most of her Hollywood appearances turned out to be disastrous, she had one brief moment of big screen glory, which happily coincided with the start of her global domination over the pop music world. In 1985, just as her second album Like a Virgin began to conquer the world, she starred as titular character of Desperately Seeking Susan, comedy by Susan Seidelman.
Actual protagonist of the film, played by Rosanna Arquette, is Roberta Glass, housewife from New Jersey whose husband Gary (played by Mark Blum) is relatively well-to-do but generally boring and mostly absent bathtub salesman. Unhappy with the routine of her married life, Roberta found hobby in reading newspaper personal ads and imagining all kinds of romantic adventures based on them. She becomes especially intrigued by "Susan" and "Jim", two lovers who use ads to maintain their relationship despite travelling to various exotic locations. Roberta decides to find out how they actually look like and comes to their rendezvous locations where she witnesses brief encounter between Susan Thomas (played by Madonna) and rock musician Jim Dandy (played by Robert Joy). She is still intrigued and begins to follow Susan, who is revealed to be a bohemian drifter with a taste for edgy fashion and tendency for one night stands. One of those encounters in Atlantic City resulted in Susan stealing cash and expensive-looking earrings, but things got further complicated when Susan’s partner got killed and Susan herself became target of a killer (played by Will Patton). Due to series of incidents, Roberta becomes afflicted with temporary amnesia and gets mistaken for Susan by Dez (played by Aidan Quinn), Jim’s friend who volunteered to look after her while Jim was on tour. In the meantime, Susan decides to get in touch with Gary who is alarmed with his wife’s sudden disappearance.
Susan is Madonna’s best role for simple reason of that character being closest to the image of sassy, punkish city girl Madonna has been using during the early stage of her music career. Madonna simply didn’t have to try that hard to play Susan and the script by Leora Barish played to her strength. The same script (rewritten by Craig Bolotin) very cleverly used formulaic elements of screwball comedy, motives of mistaken identity and MacGuffin to direct some mild criticism at suburban conformism of Reagan’s America and offer "cool" and "hip" world of New York’s bohemian artists, musicians and other colourful people as more attractive alternative. This concept works due to Susan Seidelman’s steady direction (which slightly fails apart at somewhat confusing ending) and an excellent cast. Rosanna Arquette in her first starring role is very good, although some might argue that she looks too young for the frustrated housewife. She is aided by very talented actors that appear in small roles and many of them – like John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito, Richard Edson, Aidan Quinn or Laurie Metcalf – would later become household names, especially in the world of independent cinema. Desperately Seeking Susan with its quirky characters and celebration of nonconformist lifestyle looks very much like an independent film, but in its essence it is quite conventional Hollywood project which cleverly uses Madonna’s image and music (including videoclip for her megahit "Get into the Groove") to promote itself. First Lady Nancy Reagan, who criticised the film over the scene in which two characters smoke marijuana and promote message contrary to "Just Say No" campaign, only contributed to its popularity. In the end, Desperately Seeking Susan is imperfect but mostly entertaining film that could be recommended even to viewers that feel little nostalgia towards 1980s.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
Blog in Croatian https://draxblog.com Blog in English https://draxreview.wordpress.com/ Leofinance blog https://leofinance.io/@drax.leo Cent profile https://beta.cent.co/@drax Minds profile https://www.minds.com/drax_rp_nc Uptrennd profile https://www.uptrennd.com/user/MTYzNA
Hiveonboard: https://hiveonboard.com?ref=drax Rising Star game: https://www.risingstargame.com?referrer=drax 1Inch: https://1inch.exchange/#/r/0x83823d8CCB74F828148258BB4457642124b1328e
BTC donations: 1EWxiMiP6iiG9rger3NuUSd6HByaxQWafG ETH donations: 0xB305F144323b99e6f8b1d66f5D7DE78B498C32A7
