Lea Pool's Lost & Delirious is a Juliet and Juliet love story.

Its roots in Elizabethan drama are not lost on the characters in this gentle, sensitive coming-of-age drama nor on the audience.

Pool hammers home the comparisons between her infatuated school girls and Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers in Romeo and Juliet.

She has the girls studying Shakespeare in their literature classes, memorizing his love sonnets and obsessing over his doomed heroes and heroines.

Like Shakespeare's tragic young lovers, Pauline Oster (Piper Perabo) and Victoria Moller (Jessica Pare) are wildly in love.

They hold hands and cuddle playfully in public, kiss in the shadows and make love at night.

Pauline and Victoria don't think of themselves as lesbians. They just know they love each other.

They even join other girls in the snickering assumption that several of their teachers are gay.

They are so confident in the honesty and purity of their love that they do not attempt to hide it from their new roommate Mary Bradford (Mischa Barton) and gradually Mary comes to accept the love as real, if not entirely normal.

When the girls are discovered naked in bed together one morning, the idyllic world the girls have created comes crashing in.

Victoria is terrified of the consequences of being outed so she immediately begins a sexual affair with Jake (Luke Kirby), a senior at an nearby boys' school.

Pauline is crushed at being rejected, vows revenge and, in grand Elizabethan fashion, even challenges Jake to a duel.

This is hardly an original premise for a coming-of-age movie, but what makes it compelling is Pool's candour in her approach to the material.

She doesn't sensationalize the sex scenes or the more gentle, intimate ones but neither does she shy away from them.

She treats the intimacy and playfulness in the same way Pauline and Victoria initially do.

This allows the audience to see and understand both the innocence and passion.

The performances are uniformly strong and honest.

Pare has lost the awkwardness she exhibited in Denys Arcand's Stardom. There's nothing guarded and stilted about her acting.

Pare captures the fear Victoria experiences and the confusion her decisions bring.

Given her embarrassing turns in Coyote Ugly and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Perabo didn't seem capable of such a fearless, driven performance.

Jackie Burroughs and Graham Greene lend strong support as the sympathetic adults who offer understanding when they should have given guidance.

Barton has a wistful sincerity as the film's narrator and innocent observer of this tragic tale.

Lost & Delirious is a powerful, affecting story of first love with all its joy, exuberance, angst and sorrow.

(This film is rated AA)

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