Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
A bored New Jersey suburban housewife's fascination with a free-spirited woman she has read about in the personal columns leads to her being mistaken for the woman herself and into a chaotic adventure of amnesia and self-discovery.
Desperately Seeking Susan is a fun, scrappy 80s comedy-crime caper elevated by Madonna's magnetic screen presence and Rosanna Arquette's charmingly flustered lead performance. The mistaken-identity/amnesia premise is handled with decent comedic energy, though the plot mechanics are fairly conventional and the pacing grows uneven. The cinematography is workmanlike New York location shooting — functional but unremarkable. The film has a distinct downtown NYC punk-meets-pop cultural flavor that gives it some period novelty, but it doesn't push particularly hard into truly original territory. The ending resolves things tidily but without much surprise or resonance.