A bored suburban housewife yearning for excitement traces the personals ad of the film's title and is thrust headlong into a series of trendy misadventures in downtown Manhattan. It plays like a more audience-friendly alternative to 'After Hours', released the same year (and, coincidentally, also featuring Rosanna Arquette), sharing the same artsy-fartsy underground NY setting, but with none of the nightmare momentum of Martin Scorsese's black comedy of errors. Unfortunately the already stale mistaken identity plot twist is reinforced by a convenient stroke of amnesia, in screen writing terms a sure sign of a desperate imagination. The film is a slave to contemporary fashions, carried to extremes by the casting of Madonna as the tawdry, streetwise title character. She couldn't act to save her own life (and in a role which should have been second nature to her), but let's be fair: the script doesn't give her much to work with, being nowhere desperate enough to qualify as the modern urban screwball comedy it aspires to.
Review of Desperately Seeking Susan
