Lesbian schoolgirl revenge!

>> Piper Perabo plays a lover scorned in Lost and Delirious

by MATTHEW HAYS

For Piper Perabo, saying yes to the starring role in Lost and Delirious was a no-brainer. So she plays a schoolgirl who falls for another schoolgirl (played by Quebec wunderkind Jessica Paré, star of last year's Denys Arcand film Stardom), and eventually goes off her rocker. Perabo relished the challenge.

"After Coyote Ugly, I was looking for something a bit more serious," says Perabo, looking cool and composed in a downtown Montreal hotel. "I saw Léa Pool's last film, Emporte-moi, at the New York Film Festival. I learned that she was having a casting call and got ahold of the script. I read for it and then learned that she wanted me for it."

In Delirious, Pool's seventh feature, Perabo plays the ultimate outsider. The film is told from the perspective of Mischa Barton (The Sixth Sense), an innocent who rooms with both Perabo and Paré, watching as their romantic and sexual relationship unravels. All starts out well, with the two girls clearly falling in love, but Hell breaks loose when some young girls pour into the room one morning to find the two in bed in the buff. In true schoolgirl tradition, rumours fly, and Paré, desperate to fend off any nasty rumours of lesbianism, rejects Perabo and takes on a boyfriend. Perabo promptly snaps, taking out her strained emotions on Paré's boyfriend and Perabo herself.

Almost famous

Oddly enough, Perabo seems very familiar, despite having made only three widely released films (including this one). She starred in the Jerry-Bruckheimer-produced Coyote Ugly as an aspiring young songwriter who ends up paying the bills with a bartending job. The film did okay box office in cinemas, but is picking up a sizable cult following on video. Though it's got its camp moments--the plot's many twists give the film a Showgirls-like credibility--Perabo says she wasn't playing the film for subversive laughs. "I was in every scene of that film. The schedule was very gruelling. When I had a down moment, someone would then give me dancing lessons or show me how to play an instrument. So I really didn't have time to think about other levels, like camp."

The other bit of strangeness came with The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, last year's live-action feature-length version of the classic '60s cartoon. Being one of the only critics on the planet who actually liked this movie, I'm not certain if Perabo actually believes me when I share my thoughts on it.

De Niro's focus

"For me, Rocky was nothing but a good experience," she says. "There were so many cameos by so many experienced famous actors, that it was like a crash-course in film acting." And, Perabo recalls, she got to arrest none other than Robert De Niro, who plays the villainous Boris in the film's climactic scene. "He has an incredible focus," she says of the man many consider the greatest living American screen actor. "A film set can be a very distracting place. You're immediately drawn into his level of focus."

These high-profile films have led to a lot of positive press for Perabo, with both Talk and Variety citing her as a young actress to watch. With Delirious, she's definitely taking a different turn, one for the more serious. Did playing a tragic woman in love with another woman give her reason to pause? "No, no, I never considered that the film would ever hurt me," she insists. "Unless my work sucked." And working with Pool, Perabo reports, was "a dream. She's an incredibly supportive director, and her intuition is amazing. We'd be doing a take and I'd be thinking of how I could do it in a different way, but I'd hold back. She'd pick up on my feelings and tell me to run with it. I think she brought out the best in me."

And how did Perabo find the gal-on-gal love scenes? "Love scenes like that are always difficult technically, gaining this sense of intimacy when there are 40-odd crew members around staring at you."

Lost and Delirious opens Friday, July 20 at Ex-Centris in English with French subtitles