Desperately Seeking Susan

Desperately Seeking Susan was a big hit in its day. The trouble is that the day was 1985, midway through a decade when MTV was born, the music died and fashion turned ugly.  Madonna was its biggest pop star and in her screen debut she plays the Susan of the title, an insufferably smug punkette who hustles her way from guy to guy, her last mark being a gangster who gets thrown out of a hotel window. Meanwhile she periodically meets her boyfriend through the personal columns.  Bored and sexually frustrated housewife Roberta  (Rosanna Arquette) who has been imagining Susan’s love life through said columns  decides to track her down but gets mistaken for her by a particularly inept mob goon who is also looking for her. A madcap adventure ensues

Whilst the form of the mistaken identity plot recalls Martin Scorsese’s After Hours which was released the same year and also starred Arquette, Seidelman is not in that director’s league and her film plays like a series of incidents stretched well beyond their staying power. The perfunctory narrative has the depth of a music video  and in places the film recalls the kind of style-over-substance pretensions that also made Diva (1981) a Zeitgeist hit, although even in that respect DSS falls short of that mark. There are a few nice touches – notably a low-rent cabaret hosted by John Turturro with a magician and a band of superannuated musicians that would be well in place in a Woody Allen movie and the occasional  one-liner but for the most part the film will most likely be seen today as a reminder of just how awful 1980s fashion really was.

 

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