Who’s That Girl (1987)

(In French, On TV, November 2019) I strongly suspect that anyone seeing Who’s That Girl today, with no real knowledge of Madonna, would have a very different experience than those who saw it in the late 1980s in a pop-culture environment saturated with Madonna in films and song. The film was badly received at the time, with critics piling on to decry its modern reimagining of screwball comedy tropes, and delivering mixed opinions on Madonna’s acting skills. It’s not necessarily a better movie today—the schematic nerd-meets-firebrand plot premise is overly familiar, the attempts to recreate screwball madness are not quite successful, and James Foley’s direction is not what the film needs. (Don’t worry—he’d direct much better movies later.)  But one element of Who’s That Girl may have improved, and that’s Madonna’s go-for-broke comic performance as The Girl. While she’s hardly a good actress (I’ve often said, truthfully, that she’s a far better performer in French than in English—because her voice dubbers do much better line-reading) and her self-styling after Marilyn Monroe often fall short, she’s not too bad here. Her comic timing is pretty good, she commits to a very specific performance and she eventually creates a character that’s not Madonna. What twenty-first century viewers have that late-1980s viewer don’t is the ability to differentiate between Madonna-the-persona and the not-so-ditzy ball of energy she plays here. She’s not that good—but as with the film itself, she’s watchable, and the Razzies people once again made idiots of themselves by band-wagoning into “worst of the year” nominations for the result. Have a look at Who’s That Girl: it’s not that bad, but more than that it’s interesting.