Desperately Seeking Susan

Another of the movies that showed up during one of the free preview weekends was Desperately Seeking Susan. It's got multiple airings coming up over the next week, starting with early tomorrow (May 16) at 4:45 AM on The Movie Channel (or three hours later if you only have the west coast feed).

Susan (pop singer Madonna) is a woman who travels the world, doing God only knows what, at least that's what her friends know. We obviously know because we get to see it. As far as they're concerned, she brings chaos wherever she goes. As the movie opens, she's in Atlantic City with some guy who's not her regular boyfriend. As she's leaving the hotel while he's asleep, she pilfers some money and a pair of earrings from his coat. The guy gets shot for his trouble by gangsters.

Meanwhile, because Susan is traveling the world, she and her more-or-less regular boyfriend, Jim (Robert Joy), a rock musician who travels a lot, have taken to taking out ads in the personals letting each other know when they'll be available for a meeting. Apparently, some people actually read the personals, and not just the ones looking for dates. One of those people is Roberta Glass (Rosanna Arquette). She's a housewife living in Fort Lee, New Jersey, together with her husband Gary (Mark Blum) who has made a fairly good living for himself and his wife out of selling hot tubs and bathroom spas. But she's bored, and has a sort of fantasy life wondering about those personals.

One day, Gary needs Roberta to go in to New York City on a business errand. At the same time, Roberta has read that this is the day that Susan and Jim are going to having one of their trysts, in New York's Battery Park. So Roberta decides that she's going to go to Battery Park and see what it's all about, following Susan after the two split up and even buying a jacket that Susan trades in at a vintage clothing store. Roberta finds that the jacket has a locker key, obviously not knowing that Susan has hidden something valuable in that locker. Instead, Roberta takes out a "Depserately Seeking Susan" ad, knowing that this will pique Susan's interest and get her to show up at Battery Park and get the key back.

But the meeting doesn't go as planned. The gangster who shot Susan's partner in Atlantic City and has been following Susan shows up, although of course neither of them knows who this guy is. Also, Susan has been unable to make the meeting because she can't pay her cab fare. Jim, meanwhile, has sent his best friend Dez (Aidan Quinn) to the meeting because Jim read about the guy from Susan's trip to Atlantic City getting killed. Sound complicated? Well, it's about to get more complicated. As the gangster chases Roberta, thinking this is Susan, she falls in hits her head, losing her bag in the process. As happens in the movies, she winds up with a case of amnesia and Dez thinks this is actually Susan.

This causes all sorts of problems on the way to a fairly madcap ending, with Roberta getting accused of prositution and the normally staid Gary smoking pot with Susan, and a parody of bad nightclub musicians mixed in. The plot of Desperately Seeking Susan is one that probably ought not be analyzed too much; instead, just sit back and have fun.

Rosanna Arquett and Aidan Quinn both do good jobs. More surprisingly, Madonna, who selected this as her first big role as she wanted to get into acting, is also a lot of fun as the woman who causes destruction everywhere she goes. There's also several of Madonna's early hits on the soundtrack, as the movie is firmly but fabulously in the 1980s. (Of course, with cell phones nowadays, a plot like this couldn't work at all.)

So just enjoy the ride. Desperately Seeking Susan is quite the enjoyable ride indeed.