"Lost and Delirious" is a hymn to teenage idealism and hormones. It has been reviewed as a movie about steamy lesbian sex in a girls' boarding school, which is like reviewing Secretariat on the basis of what he does in the stable. The truest words in the movie are spoken by Paulie, the school rebel, when she says she is not a lesbian because her love rises above mere categories and exists as a transcendent ideal.
Indulge me while I tell you that as a teenager I was consumed by the novels of Thomas Wolfe. His autobiographical heroes were filled with a passion to devour life, to experience everything, to make love to every woman, read every book in the library. At night he could not sleep, but wandered the campus, "uttering wild goat cries to the moon." I read every word Wolfe ever published. Today I find him unreadable--yes, even Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home Again . I have outlived that moment when all life seemed spread before me, all possibilities open to me, all achievements within my reach. Outlived it, but not forgotten it. "Lost and Delirious" stirred within me memories of that season in adolescence when the heart leaps up in passionate idealism--and inevitably mingles it with sexual desire.