Desperately seeking Susan

National Review, June 14, 1985 by John Simon

SOME MOVIES are so drab and dreary--even if they purport the be giddy comedies, and perhaps especially then--that you could grind your teeth down to the gums writing about this stuff. But that is what's out there, and the reader is entitled to be warned by being made to suffer a bit vicariously. Most of the movies now being produced are aimed deliberately at the youth market, compared to which your average flea market is Sotheby's. I have tried to stick to those that aspire a little--higher say, sweet 16 going on jaded 17--but even thse are foolish, bedraggled, pitiful. Take three samples.

Desperately Seeking Susan, by Susan Seidelman, a fairly recent NYU Film School graduate, has received an unfair share of raves along with a few discerning brickbats. I missed Miss Seidelman's first feature, Smithereens, the sort of movie where, I gather, the fuss had less to do with quality than with its having been brought in at a mere $80,000. But the new one cost $5 million, which makes it $4,999,999.98 in excess of the worth of Miss Seidelman's ideas. A ludicrous scenario by Leora Barish has Roberta, a mousy, repressed New Jersey housewife, ardently following around Susan--a swinger and drifter, one of whose lovers places messages for her in the want ads Roberta reads--who now sports ancient Egyptian earrings she has appropriated from a fleeting lover just murdered by his accomplice in an art theft. By a series of complicated and preposterous incidents, Roberta, while wearing Susan's jacket, is hit over the head, becomes amnesia, is mistaken for Susan both by the other thief out to get her and the earrings, and by Dez, a pal of Susan's main man, who is supposed to be watching over her in the latter's absence. Meanwhile, the real Susan ends up in Fort Lee getting involved with Roberta's philandering husband, while ...

But why go on? The story is sheer nonsense despite the odd, forlorn laugh; and the film's values are Gordianly confused. On the one hand, we are clearly supposed to admire Susan's emancipated freewheeling; on the other, we are meant to believe that Dez, a distrait movie projectionist, and Roberta, the newly liberated drudge (thanks to another knock, she recovers her identity, but only after a night in jail as a presumed hooker, where she learns a lot from a philosophical prostitute, as wouldn't from someone combining two of the most ancient professions?), will find old-style, happily-ever-after Hollywood bliss together in the East Village, while the beastly husband will end up alone, and in New Jersey at that. The strategy here is to make facile contrasts between the deliciously madcap life of bohemia and the oppressive and repressive existence (except for double-standard husbands) of suburbia. The stolen earrings and pursuit story are finally just a red herring, and galloping amnesia in 1985 is bad enough to make one wish the screen-writer had been knocked on the noodle instead, and had completely forgotten those lousy old movies from which she was cribbing--even, with a little extra luck, the wretched script she herself was concocting.

Miss Seidelman, except for a doggedly driving energy, shows no special talent, not even for getting much out of her actors. Rossana Arquette is too sweet for even the merest two-dimensional Roberta, and, as Dez, Aidan Quinn is just a loose-jawed, limp-eyed lug. As Susan, Madonna works out well enough, thanks to her innate quality of not-quite-top-grade meat that has a way of pouting from top to toe. But her acting is only as good as a roulette ball is on a roulette wheel--just try it on a soccer field. One thing about Miss Seidelman's film did, however, strike me. Any number of shots--anything from people getting out of an airplane to hors d'oeuvres being served at a cocktail party--are taken with the camera roughly waist-high. Later, seeing Miss S. at a gathering, I found her to be circa five feet tall. So there is a moral to this film after all: One person's eye level is another's belt level. The trouble that the moral is of not much greater use than the film.