Beautiful Dreamer in a Minefield Desperately Seeking Susan

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) lives in New Jersey. Her husband sells hot tubs and makes a fool of himself on his TV commercials. Her diet-conscious friends drink rum and Tab. A romantic interlude for her consists of watching Rebecca on the Late Show. This is no life for someone who keeps a diary and looks like a new-minted movie star. No wonder she spends a lot of time leafing longingly through the personals column of a New York City tabloid, in particular mooning over a free-floating couple, Susan and Jim, who arrange their assignations, all over the country, by placing ads there. Whatever problems they might have must be more interesting than getting a new radio installed in the Mustang or mastering whatever recipe the Julia Child rerun is offering. Perhaps if Roberta could spy on their next advertised meeting she could . . .

Get a bop on the head. Suffer amnesia. Exchange identities with the desperately sought Susan (played by Madonna, whose affectlessness in the face of adversity may or may not constitute acting but is marvelously comic). Find herself pursued by one of organized crime's less organized branches. Fall into a loft and a love affair with the projectionist from a kung fu grind house. Find work as a gloriously addled magician's assistant. Get mistaken by the police for a prostitute. In other words, there is more to Roberta's modest attempt at an afternoon's adventure than she bargained for.

And there is more to this movie, the work of young barely knowns, than audiences may bargain for in a time when adolescent frenzy is often mistaken for comedy. One guesses that Screenwriter Barish or Director Seidelman was raised in Roberta's world, escaped to Susan's funk scene in lower Manhattan, and lived not just to tell both tales but to process them coolly and ironically. There is not a desperate frame in Desperately Seeking Susan--no anger, no false sentiment, no patronizing. Like the screwball comedies of yore, it places entirely probable people in a highly improbable situation and requires that they consult their own sorely tested inner logic to find a way out.

Arquette's instincts for this kind of comedy are superb. She is a beautiful dreamer walking through a minefield, at once vulnerable and invincible--and just possibly the funny lady the world has been wanting to cuddle up with for years. In Seidelman she has an admirably laconic director who trusts her material, her impeccably cast actors and herself. In other words she does not lead the laughter at her own jokes. How nice it is to go to a farcically fizzing movie that bursts with youthful high spirits yet still treats you like a functioning adult. By Richard Schickel

Rosanna Arquette is a one-woman encounter group. Emotions flush onto her bold-featured face, hold for a moment to illuminate her character's pensive or convulsive mood, then fly away. Always changing, always right. "Emotionally," says John Sayles, who directed her as the Jewish princess in Baby, It's You, "Rosanna can go from zero to 60 in no time flat." In Desperately Seeking Susan, Arquette reveals herself as a master of comic body language--and there is eloquence in that delicately voluptuous body--but she still uses something like an internal Ouija board to find Roberta's pressure points. Says Susan Seidelman: "Rosanna has a rich emotional life she's in constant touch with. It meant for enormous temperamental ups and downs on the set. But then I'd look at the rushes and love what's on the screen."

If all this seems like a flashback to the you-are-what-you-feel 1960s, there is a reason: Arquette, 25, is a flower child come to blossom. The granddaughter of TV Humorist Cliff ("Charley Weaver") Arquette, and daughter of a Second City improv artist and an activist poet, Rosanna played in the mud at Woodstock when she was ten and was taken by her mother on peace marches, her naked body painted STOP THE WAR, KILL NO MORE. After the tenth grade she left school in Chicago and hitchhiked to California. "I just bummed," she told TIME Correspondent Denise Worrell. "Then I moved in with a guy. I was 15. Oh, my God, isn't that terrible?" At the suggestion of her parents, Arquette made her stage debut in Los Angeles at 17, then appeared in low- budget movies until her first big break, as Gary Gilmore's spacey girlfriend in TV's The Executioner's Song (1982). About that time she moved in with Steve Porcaro, keyboardist for the rock sextet Toto, whose biggest hit, Rosanna, was inspired by her. She now lives alone in the hills above Los Angeles.

Hollywood is in the throes of a love affair with Arquette. Besides Susan, she is starring in The Aviator, a Christopher Reeve adventure movie; the first part of a PBS series, Survival Guides, directed by Jonathan Demme; this summer's Silverado, a Lawrence Kasdan western; and After Hours, made in New York City by Martin Scorsese. Not bad for someone with, as she puts it, "a chronic insecurity problem. As an actress I think I have a lot to learn. And I think I'm learning."