Canadian Women Film Directors Database
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Lost and Delirious

Directed by Léa Pool
Canada, 2001 (fiction, 102 minutes, colour, English)
Also known as "A Outra Metade do Amor", "Assunto de Meninas", "El último suspiro", "Elátkozott szerelem", "Kayip ve çilgin", "L'altra metà dell'amore", "La rage au coeur", "Pasión prohibida", "Rebelles", "Szép szédülés", "Zagubione"
Lost and Delirious
Image: © Cité-Amérique
Film Description:
"Mouse Bradford has just arrived at Perkins Girl's College. She has left behind the small town where she grew up, her father and her stepmother. Mouse is quickly adopted by her two senior roommates, the striking, sharp-witted Paulie and the charming and beautiful Tory. The three become inseparable as they bond over loss: Mouse has lost her mother, Paulie has lost the parents who gave her up for adoption, and Tory is losing herself to fit her parents' expectations. Although they are the closest friends she has ever had, Mouse is confused by the depth of the relationship between Paulie and Tory. The world comes crashing down when Tory and Paulie are inadvertently caught in a compromising situation. Unable to justify their relationship to her family, Tory gives in to the pressure and distances herself from Paulie and her own feelings. Mouse, torn between her friends, begins to understand what it means to be in love—and just how much of love is impossible to define."
-- Telefilm Canada (source)
Film Credits (partial):
Written by: Judith Thompson
Based on: The Wives of Bath, a novel by Susan Swan
Produced by: Greg Dummett, Lorraine Richard, Louis-Philippe Rochon
Principal Cast: Piper Perabo, Jessica Paré, Misha Barton, Jackie Burroughs
Cinematography: Pierre Gill
Film Editing: Gaétan Huot
Music: Yves Chamberland
Production Company: Cité-Amérique
(sources)

Awards won by Lost and Delirious

Quote by the Director

"The motivation for making a film that dealt so explicitly with homosexuality was [...] to move beyond boundaries of description and to give a new angle to the exploration of the theme in cinema. I think that the more films deal with such subjects, the better the public will be educated. Filmmakers shy away from projects like this that are hybrids, that deal with so-called indie subjects but have a more commercial nature. I like that hybrid."
-- Léa Pool (source)

Quote by the Director [in French]

"Je ne voulais pas être celle qui reste en arrière et qui regarde ses personnages s'éclater et s'écraser. Si je ne m'étais pas sentie capable d'aller dans cette folie, avec tout ce que ça demande de risque, de pousser dans cette exaltation et ce discours shakespearien, bref, si je n'avais pas pu accompagner Paulie jusqu'au bout, le film n'aurait eu aucun intérêt pour moi"
-- Léa Pool (source)

Quotes about Lost and Delirious

"Based on Susan Swan's novel The Wives of Bath, the screenplay was written by Judith Thompson, a great Canadian playwright. Director Léa Pool, sensing the magnitude of Thompson's script, executed the film's mise-en-scène from a larger-than-life perspective, creating a powerful coming-of-age film with the operatic magnitude of tragedy."
-- Hoi F. Cheu (source)

"Fans of Susan Swan's novel The Wives of Bath might be forgiven for failing to recognize it as the basis for Léa Pool's recent film, Lost and Delirious (2001), so radically have Pool and screenwriter Judith Thompson altered key aspects of Swan's original narrative about the complicated relationships among three friends [...]."
-- Peter Dickinson (source)

"The director, Léa Pool, creates a lush, thoughtfully framed and composed film; her classical visual style lends gravitas to this romantic story."
-- Roger Ebert (source)

"While [Lost and Delirious] openly tackles the sexuality issues that [Léa] Pool raised in some of her earlier films, it is not a ringing endorsement of lesbian experimentation. Paulie's punishment and death suggest a more traditional approach to this subject matter as heterosexuality triumphs in the film when Tory redefines herself for her parents and society."
-- Jennifer L. Gauthier (source)

"Despite [Léa] Pool's blithe European denial of the politics of sexual identity, the decision to cut short the lesbian character's coming of age through madness and self-destruction has an inevitable ideological edge. By the very fact of resorting to the pre-Stonewall trope of figuring such destruction as a lesson for the heterosexual characters' own interrupted coming of age, Pool loses her nerve, backtracking into an oddly incongruous and anachronistic othering of Paulie's sexual and gender identities."
-- Thomas Waugh (source)

Quotes about Lost and Delirious [in French]

"Léa Pool choisit de concentrer son regard sur la détresse intérieure de la gamine abandonnée par la puissance des préjugés, ce qui donne lieu à des moments d'une riche qualité d'émotion, au détriment, parfois, de la crédibilité de l'ensemble."
-- Anne-Lise Clément (source)

"Avec ce dernier long métrage [Lost and Delirious], [Léa] Pool s'écarte du film d'auteur auquel elle nous avait habitués et nous offre un film beau par moment, fort d'une intense et surprenante interprétation de la part de Piper Perabo, mais une oeuvre relativement impersonnelle, malheureusement à la limite du film de commande et du téléfilm. On entend, on reconnaît, on observe Léa Pool, mais sa signature, si particulière de finesse, semble avoir disparu."
-- Dominique Pellerin (source)

"En offrant une représentation de l'homosexualité en lien direct avec le point de vue hétérosexuel, par le biais d'une diégèse qui nous est véhiculée par un personnage hétérosexuel, le film [Lost and Delirious] propose, jusqu'à un certain point, une représentation du lesbianisme qui vise à éduquer le regard, familiariser le public et le guider dans une lecture de la sexualité marginale."
-- Julie Vaillancourt (source)

Bibliography for Lost and Delirious

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Web Sites about Lost and Delirious

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