Expansion isn’t merely for Star Jones’ waistline. We swell the rolls here at Shared Darkness as time and inclination permits. Ergo, this DVD review of Lost and Delirious, originally published upon its release in 2001:

I hate to stoop to such obvious levels, but: six and 28:45.
That’s the chapter number and elapsed run time into the film of the lesbian sex
scene in Lost and Delirious, and
really the only reason anyone might want to sit through this deliriously lost
little movie, a wan, meandering ball of pretension, romanticized youthful
“vigor” and manufactured intensity, all proudly wrapped up in its own pomposity.

The Wives of Bath
by Susan Swan, adapted by Judith Thompson and directed by Lea Pool, Lost and Delirious’ story of young,
sapphic love is set at an all-girls’ boarding school where it looks like an
Aerosmith video could break out at any moment. (It turns out in this instance, though,
to be the Violent Femmes’ “Add It Up.”) New arrival Mary (Mischa Barton, the
little sick girl in The Sixth Sense)
is taken under the wings of her two new roommates, Victoria (Stardom’s Jessica Paré, above right) and Paulie (Coyote Ugly’s Piper Perabo). Victoria,
or Tori, is a bit of an ingenue, while Paulie smokes cigarettes intensely, has
a poster of Che Guevera over her bed and generally presides over the roost like
a cross between One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest’s R.P. McMurphy and Angelina Jolie’s wide-eyed Girl, Interrupted menace. Tori and
Paulie have a thing, you see, but Tori breaks it off after her younger sister
catches the two in bed. Paulie takes it none too well, and their perfect world
falls apart.

A jewel in the mud, Barton is actually pretty fantastic, though she’s forced to
spend an awful lot of time pretending to be asleep while her roommates make out
and giggle or bicker and fume. Perabo’s performance, meanwhile, falls between
unchecked and astonishingly god-awful; she stalks about, chewing scenery and
aggressively mouthing along in class to poetry. I understand all too well the
intoxicating nature of adolescent affection, but please — someone interrupt
this girl. A few dewy-eyed dissenters may cite Paulie’s fractured relationship
with her birth mother as part of some grand romantic gesture (I get it, she has a tortured parallel
history of past rejection!), but this poorly constructed movie is indulgent,
obvious and ridiculous. Tears are shed, cages rattled and transparent metaphors
deployed (Paulie cares for a wounded falcon), and it’s all in the name of a
lame story that has a single obvious conclusion. Presented in anamorphic widescreen with close-captioned subttitles and an English Dolby digital 2.0 stereo track, the DVD comes with no supplemental features. D- (Movie) C- (Disc)