Move over "Personal Best". After nearly 20 years at the top of my list of "Films best watched in reverse" a little Canadian sleeper called "Lost and Delirious" has knocked you from that top spot. I was amazed that I had never heard of this movie until long after it's short stint in theaters. Not that I expect to have heard of all movies at the time they were released but I would have had to be in a coma to not have heard about this movie. Why should I have heard of this movie? Because for as much as I would like to hope that someday movies in which Hollywood's best and brightest young stars, Perabo, Barton and Parre in this case, find themselves involved in a lesbian relationship will be such commonplace and not reason enough to see it and certainly not reason enough to order the DVD from Canada more than a month in advance of the US release that is not the reality today. Now having seen this movie it seems even less likely to happen within my lifetime. By now some people reading this are probably thinking, "this is supposed to be a movie review not a diatribe on the lack of lesbians in film" (probably in language not suitable for this site). Unfortunately, this film showed me just how far society hasn't come. A fact made further evident by the majority of the other reviews posted on this site. This is a lesbian movie. It's a love story but it's a movie about two young women in love with each other. This is what drives the entire plot of the movie. Take away the lesbians and there's not much of a love story left, not much of anything left. The heart wrenching and ultimately tragic consequences that ensue do so as a direct result of the inability of all of the film's characters to deal with the fact that they are involved in a lesbian relationship. While Perabo and Parre are the lovers all three of the characters including Barton are very much involved in the relationship. In fact Mouse/Mary B. (Barton) is the only character in the entire movie who really attempts to address the issue that perhaps the girls are lesbians only to be told by both of the girls that they aren't lesbians. They just love each other and they have sex, often with Barton in the room but they aren't lesbians. These girls aren't just lost and delirious they are delusional. They believe that Barton is asleep and oblivious to them making love night after night in a small boarding school room. The first two times I watched the movie I thought how ridiculous it was to have these girls who are so afraid of people calling them lesbians making love with a girl they hardly knew just a few feet away. As I watched the third time I realized that they probably did believe for the brief moments they may have thought about it. It's not stated just how long the two had been involved, the implication is that it had been going on for some length of time and that the school's Head Mistress and many others were aware of it as well. It had gone on so long that they had become passionately in love with one another and in the process created for themselves a little bubble in which their love could thrive without ever having to face the reality of what it meant to be a woman in love with another woman. When the bubble bursts neither of the girls have developed the skills to deal with the reactions of others. Lost and Delirious is for the most part a good movie. The script was by far it's weakest link with the dialogue sounding somewhat unnatural and as a viewer you become completely aware that they are actresses and you're watching a movie. It works itself out though and I fell quickly back into the storybook after these bumps. The actressâ?Ts performances were generally at least up to par with what I would expect from young talent, which all three women most definitely possess. I found Parre to be a little weak and unbelievable at times in her delivery but that was also the nature of her character and often during scenes in which she was delivering some of the more poorly scripted lines. Perabo showed her true talent by delivering one of the most passionate performances I've seen in a long time. Sometimes it hurt to watch because I could feel her pain as if it were my own. Mischa Barton is definitely one to watch. She has a true star quality, the indescribable thing possessed by so few and coveted by so many. Overall Lost and Delirious is a good movie which ten years ago I would have been just thrilled to have seen made. But ten years ago I thought that by now there would be not just more lesbian movies but at least a few more with happy endings if not in the theatrical release at least on the DVD. The ending hurt me more because I thought of all the young girls who had written such great things about this movie and put up fan sites for it not because it's the greatest movie they've ever seen but because it showed mainstream actresses portraying lesbian characters that they could identify with. My generation had Personal Best with a beautiful young Margot Hemmingway as the non-lesbian woman in love with and having sex with another woman. Of course since none of the characters in either of these movies are lesbians - unless you watch the movie backwards. Lives can't be lived backwards and people shouldn't feel that they have to try to live them that way in order to have a happy ending. Until art imitates life, and at there's at least one movie (aside from small indie films) where the girl gets the girl and they live happily ever after I'll keep watching this one backwards.
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