Madonna Archives - Sean Kelly On Movies

After days of self-isolation due to COVID-19, I was seeking a light film to watch to escape from what was going on in the outside world. Thankfully, the Criterion Channel currently has a number of films from director Susan Seidelman, including the 1985 comedy Desperately Seeking Susan, which was the acting debut for Madonna, whose music career at the time was just starting to take off.Susan (Madonna) is a drifter, whose boyfriend Jim (Robert Joy) regularly leaves newspaper ads "Desperately Seeking Susan," in order to arrange meet-ups in various cities. The latest ad catches the attention of bored New Jersey housewife Roberta Glass (Rosanna Arquette), who travels to New York to witness Susan and Jim's meeting in Battery Park. Roberta ends following Susan and buys her jacket at a thrift shop, where she finds a locker key in the pocket. Robert leaves an ad for Susan to return the key, however, it catches the attention of mobster Wayne Nolan (Will Patton), who is seeking a pair of earrings Susan took. In a confrontation with Wayne, Roberta ends up banging her head, before she is saved by Dez (Aidan Quinn), a friend of Jim's sent to check up on Susan. With Roberta suffering from amnesia from the bump on her head, she comes to believe that she herself is Susan.Celebrating its 35th anniversary in just a few weeks, Desperately Seeking Susan will probably forever be remembered for helping to cement the superstardom of Madonna. At the time, the singer was riding high on the success of her breakthrough second album "Like a Virgin" and her presence does somewhat overshadow the lead performance by Rosanna Arquette, to the point that Arquette won a BAFTA Award for her role in the Best Supporting Actress category. Desperately Seeking Susan features a typical mistaken-identity plotline that is loosely inspired by the 1974 French film Céline and Julie Go Boating.For better or worse, my biggest takeaway of Desperately Seeking Susan was that it indeed came off like a film produced in the 1980s. This includes some of the less than positive aspects, such as some outdated depictions of race and gender. That said, the film can also be interpreted as being about Roberta, who is in a very loveless marriage with her husband Gary (Mark Blum) and disliked by her sister-in-law Leslie (Laurie Metcalf), learning how to become an independent woman. This, of course, includes developing a connection with Dez, who turns out to be a better match for Roberta, even though he believes her to be Susan for most of the film.Desperately Seeking Susan is arguably the best-known film from Susan Seidelman, who also directed the films Cookie and She-Devil, before transitioning into directing primarily television, which included three episodes of Sex and the City. Even though this film helped to cement Madonna's superstardom, she had to beat out the likes of Goldie Hawn, Melanie Griffith, and Jennifer Jason Leigh to get cast in the role of Susan. Madonna also contributed to the film's soundtrack with the hit single "Into the Groove," which includes the very meta moment of Susan dancing to the song in a nightclub.The cameo from the subjects of Three Identical Strangers in Desperately Seeking SusanThose who have seen the 2018 documentary Three Identical Strangers would have known that the subjects of that film received a cameo in Desperately Seeking Susan as their fame at the time. Watching the film two years after seeing Three Identical Strangers, it is definitely surreal how prominent the cameo is, as the three brothers are just standing there in identical clothing, smiling at Madonna as she walked into a building. Even before Three Identical Strangers made the triplets more recognizable to the general public, this moment was obviously meant to draw attention to the three.Altogether, I will say that Desperately Seeking Susan was a fine film, which satisfied my desire for some light viewing in a tough period.

Premium Classics: Desperately Seeking Susan

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