Lost and Delirious

Lost and Delirious

Lost and Delirious is the story of three adolescent girls’ first love, their discovery of sexual passion, and their search for identities. Set in a posh, private boarding school surrounded by luxuriant, green forest, Los and Delirious moves swiftly from academic routine, homesickness and girlish silliness to the darker region of lover’s intrigue. A newcomer to a girl’s boarding school is befriended by her two roommates and later discovers they are lovers. When one of the lovers decides she doesn’t dare continue the relationship, the other becomes desperate in her attempts to win her back.

Mary Bedford is a shy, naïve, freshman newcomer to a fancy girls boarding school where she strikes up a friendship with her two senior roommates, the overachieving Tori Moller, and the voraciously poetry reading, unapologetic, closeted lesbian Paullie Oster. As Mary tries to adjust to her new surroundings, with some guidance from the local groundskeeper Joe Menzies, she soon learns that Paulie and Tori are lovers. When Tori, under pressure from her classmates, wants to break it off with Paulie, she resorts to extreme measures to win Tori back. When her father remarries after the death of her mother, Mary Bedford finds herself bundled off to a posh girls’ boarding school. She’s never been to boarding school before and it’s all quite daunting at first. Soon however she makes friends, including her two roommates, Tori and Paulie, whom she soon realizes are lovers. She also becomes quite friendly with the gardener, Joe Menzies, and helps him on the school grounds as it reminds her of working with her late mother in the family garden. When Tori decides to end her relationship with Paulie however, tragedy ensues. A newcomer to a posh girls’ boarding school discovers that her two senior roommates are lovers.

Mary (Mischa Barton) is a 14-year-old freshman and a new student at an all-girls boarding school located somewhere in rural Ontario and she is assigned to a dorm room with Paulie (Piper Perabo) and Victoria, nicknamed Tori, (Jessica Pare), two seniors. In an effort to get the shy Mary to break out of her shell, Paulie and Tori involve her in their activities, such as running in the morning. When they hear that Mary’s mother has recently died, Paulie nicknames her “Mary Brave”. On Mary’s first day at school, Pauline turns a quiet afternoon on the campus into a music-blasting dance party and spikes the punch with hard liquor. Another day later, Pauline defends Victoria from a frustrated Math teacher who humiliates her when she does not understand basic Math.

Mary observes the intimacy between the two roommates. Peering out a window at night, she sees them kissing on a roof. Pauline and Tori’s relationship is close and Pauline is full of life. Over time, Pauline and Tori become more comfortable showing affection in front of Mary. It progresses from a quick kiss on the lips in front of her to the two sharing a bed and having lesbian sex while Mary is sleeping.

When the three are not jogging one day, Pauline comes across a hurt falcon, which she befriends. After reading up on falcons, she trains the animal while keeping it in a makeshift birdhouse on the roof of their dorm building. While she is tending to the falcon, Mary and Tori meet some boys from the nearby boys’ school. One of them, named Jake, flirts with Tori, asking if she will be attending her brother’s 18^th birthday party and making it clear that he likes her. When Mary and Tori are alone, Tori expresses disgust at the boy’s interest in her, saying “He liked my tits.” While Mary asks if she’ll go to the party, Tory says, “And have all those gross guys groping me? No. Thanks. I’d rather stay home and do Math.”

Meanwhile, on the sides, Mary spends time with the local groundskeeper Joe Menzies (Graham Greene) whom she volunteers to help him work with landscaping around the campus. Mary confides in Joe about her troubled home life and her lack of parental attention by her father whom began neglecting her following her mother’s death and focuses his attention on her stepmother whom treats Mary badly. Joe encourages Mary to live out her frustration and unhappiness through work.

One morning, Victoria’s sister, Allison (Emily VanCamp), another freshman student and her friends rush into the room to wake up the older girls. Pauline is lying in Tori’s bed, both clearly topless. Horrified silence falls over everyone. Mary pushes Tori’s sister out of the room and closes the door. Tori angrily tells Pauline to get out of her bed. Pauline tries to downplay the situation and Tori tells her she doesn’t understand, explaining that her sister will tell her parents about it. When confronted by Allison, Tori tries to extinguish her sister’s suspicion by telling her that Pauline has an unrequited crush on her and crawled into her bed. Her sister promises to “fix” the rumors about Tori and not tell their parents anything. As she walks away from this conversation, Victoria collapses into tears.

In the school library, Victoria explains to Mary that her conservative family, her parents and her sister are strongly opposed to homosexuality and she must stop the relationship with Pauline to prevent their rejection. Mary sympathizes with both of her friends, as she too feels rejected by her father, who does not bother to show up to a father/daughter dance. In the forest at night, Victoria and Jake have sex against a tree. Both Mary and Pauline accidentally witness this scene and run back to their room before Victoria returns.

When Victoria returns to the room, Pauline asks her where she’s been and Victoria says she was with a friend. Pauline lashes out at her by telling her that she saw what Victoria and Jake were doing in the woods. In a very poignant moment, Victoria tells Pauline that the intimacy that they shared will never happen again but she (Victoria) will always lover, both as a friend and as a lover. At this point, Pauline rapidly degenerates into psychotic behavior over Victoria’s withdrawal from their relationship. She smashes a mirror and hurls a dish cart to the ground and begins to act out in belligerent ways in class and out of it. A rejection letter from the agency that handled Pauline’s adoption, which informs her that her birth mother denied a request from Pauline to get in touch, further sends her over the edge.

When Pauline is called into the Headmistress Fay Vaughn’s (Jackie Burroughs) office over mouthing off one too many times to a teacher, Pauline refuses to talk to Headmistress Vaughn about her recent behavior or what is bothering her. The Headmistress suggests that Pauline is going through a nervous breakdown, but Pauline says that it’s not the reason and storms out of the office. Later, when Headmistress Vaughn confronts Pauline on the school’s quad, Pauline finally confides in her about her romance with a female student who ended it out of shame (without naming Victoria’s name). The Headmistress is surprisingly very sympathetic with Pauline. She tells Pauline that when she was younger, she suffered a nervous breakdown too when her “girlfriend” abandoned her in a similar situation, but the Headmistress got over it and offers emotional support for Pauline. But Pauline refuses to talk anymore and walks off.

Meanwhile, Victoria, clearly ashamed of being a lesbian, creates a fabricated image of her heterosexuality to her friends and her sister by dating Jake Hollander (Luke Kirby) from a nearby all boys’ school and avoiding Pauline.

One day in the woods, Pauline declares a fencing duel to the death with Jake. Jake is not taking her seriously until he ends up on the ground after being slashed, with Pauline brandishing a sword above him. She demands that he give up Victoria. When he refuses, she stabs him in the leg. Mary rushes to stop her and Pauline runs off.

Mary runs to Victoria’s soccer match, where the Headmistress, Math teacher and fellow students are congregated. Upon reaching the group, Mary sees Pauline sobbing from the top of a nearby building while holding her falcon. Whispering “I rush into the secret house” (a reference to Shakespeare on suicide) Pauline jumps to her death, and as she falls, the injured falcon flies out of the doomed Pauline’s hands into the air. The final shot shows the recovered falcon flying away into the bright blue sky background.