Lost and Delirious (2001)

Lost and Delirious is a 2001 Canadian drama directed by Léa Pool and adapted from Susan Swan's novel The Wives of Bath. It concerns three roommates at an upmarket boarding school, and it commits itself without apology to the love between two of them. Pauline and Victoria are lovers, and the film tracks the collapse that follows when Victoria's homophobic family, and Victoria's own terror of them, forces her back into the closet. Paulie, adopted and already abandoned once, does not survive the betrayal. She ends the film on a rooftop, quoting Shakespeare, and steps off it. The camera does not flinch.

The film's feminist credentials are genuine enough. Pool, a woman, tells a woman-centered story inside an institution built to shape girls into wives, and she lets her teenagers sneer at the boys from the neighboring school who paw at them. Victoria's line about a suitor liking her chest, and her refusal to attend a party where gross guys will grope her, carries a contempt the film shares. The tragedy is not that these girls love each other. It is that the world around them has priced that love at the cost of everything else.

What the film does not do is instruct. There is no sermon here, no lecture from the pulpit, only consequence. It also declines to widen its lens. The cast is nearly all white, the milieu is affluent, and race, class, money, and the environment go unmentioned, which for a 2001 Canadian indie is unremarkable and for a modern scorecard is simply absent. There is a wounded falcon, trained and then lost, and the symbolism is as subtle as a brick through a window. The critics of the day called it overwrought. They were not wrong. Perabo, however, is a geyser, and the film's sincerity burns through the clumsy metaphor. We classify it. We do not rescue it.