Desperately Seeking Susan

In her shoulder-padded take on Jacques Rivette's classic mind bender, Celine and Julie Go Boating, director Susan Seidelman created an iconic tale of intangible female obsession, ripe for a queer re-evaluation.

Rosanna Arquette is Roberta, a bored housewife who escapes the tedium of suburban heterosexuality through fantasies about the mysterious life of Susan (Madonna). After a bump to the head, and a convenient bout of amnesia, Roberta literally becomes Susan, and finds herself mixed up in a world of deception, theft and amateur magic.

Identities merge and the boundaries of lust blur as Roberta sinks deeper and deeper into a state of compulsion, before ultimately embodying both her former self and the new found object of her desire. By the time her husband asks at the film's climax, "Roberta, are you a lesbian?", I'm not sure if even she knows the answer.

Michael Blyth