We are asked to swallow several horse-pills of improbability. A yuppie Madame Bovary (Rosanna Arquette), who reads the Personals the way an earlier generation read novels, and who has identified herself with a recurrent character named Susan (pop singer Madonna), receives a bump on the head and wakes up thinking she has actually become Susan. The latter happens to have in her possession a pair of purloined Egyptian artifacts -- Nefertiti's earrings, no less -- and is being pursued by a blond-haired, black-dressed assassin. Complications follow, in rapid order. The movie, written by Leora Barish and directed by Susan Seidelman, is overplotted as a matter of style in the same way as the Susan character overdresses for style: the narrative equivalent, you might say, of jacket over fishnet over paste necklace over see-through blouse over lace bra. It never loses all contact with reality -- i.e., the sharp delineation of lifestyles, with Julia Child on one side and a bag of cheese puffs on the other, a home in suburbia and a weekly trip to the beauty parlor as against a bus-station locker and a single leopard-spotted suitcase. But at the same time, clearly, the reality base is no ball-and-chain. With Aidan Quinn, Mark Blum, Laurie Metcalf, and Will Patton. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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