Desperately Seeking Susan
First screened and reviewed in March 2025
Director: Susan Seidelman. Cast: Rosanna Arquette, Madonna, Aidan Quinn, Mark Blum, Laurie Metcalf, Will Patton, Robert Joy, Peter Maloney, Anna (Levine) Thomson, John Turturro, Steven Wright, Richard Edson, Giancarlo Esposito, John Lurie, Ann Magnuson, Shirley Stoler. Screenplay: Leora Barish. In Brief:
New York movie with a European favoring of style over story. An 80s emblem with classic Hollywood vibes.
VOR:④
Nifty and influential. Predicts Something Wild and Married to the Mob as loose, spunky character studies and mood pieces styled as studio comedies.
Not in terms of "Film History 101" but in terms of "What life have I actually led," Desperately Seeking Susan was until yesterday the single least explicable omission from my movie-watching history. Madonna was more or less my hero, my most closely studied text, and my most frequent topic of conversation for several years in the wake of her Like a Virgin album. In 1986, in 4th grade, I dressed as her for Halloween—on a Marine Corps base, because gay kids won't be stopped, even years before they know they're gay. Susan opened on March 29, 1985, and while I was aware of the ads and acutely aware that "Into the Groove" was somehow ineligible for the Billboard charts despite being the nation's hugest radio hit, I don't think the film played at our base theater or showed up on HBO during the year we subscribed. Personal history was mended last night on the movie's 40th birthday, a gesture that sentimental dreamer-protagonist Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) would certainly call "romantic." I'm thrilled when any movie is really good and was especially chuffed that this one is, and in a different, more adventurous key than I'd expected.
Desperately Seeking Susan plays as anything but desperate: with great relaxation, self-confident cool, and stealth poignancy, it's craftily and hyper-contentedly itself. You could call it an unexpected meeting-ground of 1930s MGM japes, the delicate, post-nouvelle vague French fables of Rohmer or Rivette or Buñuel or Truffaut, the personality-driven downtown New York scene of the early-to-mid 1980s, and that same moment's mini-movement of winsome Hollywood postmodern pop, best epitomized by Jonathan Demme's Something Wild and Married to the Mob. You could call Desperately Seeking Susan the rare comedy that truly doesn't beg for laughs and is in many ways indifferent to laughs, while earning plenty of them. Not to get highfalutin, but there's an almost Shakespearean sense of comedy at work here, giddy on coincidence and disguise, on doubling and embedded moments of meta-performance, while a woman gradually comes into her own as someone different than she was. This transpires via encounters with male beaus and rude antagonists and crucially with other women, in the only half-real, half-fantasized landscape where any or all of this would have proved possible.
You could also just call Susan a chill hang where artists working savvily on a small budget realize a distinctive project that feels half-planned and half-spontaneous. Susan Seidelman's direction radiates a merry in-the-moment responsivity to location and music and sidewalk energy and actorly frequencies. She lets Rosanna Arquette be quiet but not weak, the way Sylvia Sidney or Jean Arthur could be quiet but never weak, and you sense her Roberta but also her, Rosanna, becoming micro-incrementally "stronger" over the course of the movie while still suggesting a pretty dizzy dame. (There's a little more fuss and mood indicating on Arquette's face than Sidney or Arthur would have countenanced, especially in closeup and in scenes with other actors, but there's less of that as the movie continues.) Seidelman clearly saw Madonna's Stanwycky and Claire Trevor-ish qualities and eased one of pop's most performative performers into just being and giving herself. She also rescued sky-eyed love-bug Aidan Quinn from the misfire of his debut film and drew from him a character sketch not unlike Brian Aherne's in Sylvia Scarlett, watching a woman become whoever and whatever she's becoming without fading off the screen, and very much living his own curious life.
It's easy to get jazzed about the exquisitely cast and choreographed ensemble in Desperately Seeking Susan, extending to key side characters played by Robert Joy, Laurie Metcalf, Mark Blum, and Will Patton, with extra jolts of charisma from pre-famous Giancarlo Esposito, John Turturro, Ann Magnuson, Richard Edson, and Steven Wright around the edges. It's also tempting, given the movie's piquant sense of time-capsuling New York at a very particular moment, to undersell how much premeditated off-camera craft is at work here. If I invited you over to watch a film shot by Ed Lachman, edited by Andrew Mondshein, scored by Thomas Newman, and with Santo Loquasto doubling as production and costume designer, you'd surely psych yourself up for a demo of high-end studio or studio-adjacent technique. None of those guys had more than five big-screen credits by the time Seidelman employed them on Susan, proving herself as clairvoyant and adept at spotting burgeoning talent on- and off-screen (and while they were all still affordable!). Two of them belonged in the Oscar conversation that year: Lachman, combining a knack for creatively framed street photography with an attunement to motion and to heightened atmosphere, and Loquasto, a wizard as always in cajoling plummy personality from spaces and accessory combos, and in crafting some of the most iconic get-ups in the careers of some legendary actors.
There's so much new artistry announcing itself in this odd, funny movie about what it means to announce yourself, intentionally or unintentionally, or to treat your self as an art project. But Susan doesn't blare a trumpet as a self-conscious New! Talent! Showcase! the way something like St. Elmo's Fire did in the same year. Almost every participant in the film, very much including Seidelman, steps up to make something happen for themselves at a key stage in their early careers, but they all come across as more invested in this weird, exploratory lark they're all making than in what it might do for them individually. And they also come across very much as people living their weird, flavorful, disorganized lives in a weird, flavorful, disorganized city, serendipitously crossing and re-crossing paths, forgetting and then remembering, camera-ready because this era and idiom of New York were always camera-ready, but with little sense they'd behave any differently if no camera were around. Casually seeking and sometimes stumbling into low-key sublimity. Grade:B+
Golden Globe Nominations:
British Academy Awards (BAFTAs): Best Actress (Musical/Comedy): Rosanna Arquette
Other Awards:
British Academy Awards (BAFTAs): Best Supporting Actress (Arquette)
