So on a broiling day, there’s no place I’d rather escape the whine of (West Nile virus-carrying) mosquitoes and the pressure of work than an air-conditioned multiplex, where they serve Pepsi with LOTS of ice. But summer in North America is clearly half-price season for lobotomy patients. The Animal, Dr. Doolittle 2, Swordfish, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Driven, Evolution… it’s too painful to even type the names of these mindbenders. No wonder Ghost World’s been described as the sleeper hit of the summer. Anyone looking for something quiet and inoffensive to sleep through would be hard-pressed without Terry Zwigoff’s charming underachiever of a movie.

Which isn’t to imply that Best Friend and I were able to enjoy our beat-the-heat in peace. But no. Apparently, Made was too stupid even for the skipped out of the office crowd queuing for a Wednesday matinee. Not a weirdo or freak among them. So there went our smug feeling of counter-cultural cool. Of course, no-one else laughed at the moment when Enid pulls an R.Crumb album out of Seymour’s collection, and I’m pretty sure that the girl in front of me wearing a red polyester halterneck, a visor cap and raffia stack-heel sandals didn’t get the Satanists. Maybe next there’ll be Ghost World chocolate bars? If it can happen to Hothead Paisan, it can happen to Enid and Rebecca... At least in that theatre they wouldn’t quite have melted. The movie was like a slow push of slightly stale air-conditioned air across a small room: slightly refreshing mainly because it reminded you to breathe.

Are movies only cool in an inverse ratio of their need to be air-conditioned? Or something. You do the math. I’d rather my tingles came from the screen than the air vents, so the next week Best Friend and I found ourselves determined to follow the opposite strategy, and see if raising the temperature in the theatre made us feel cooler when we left. Another matinee, another movie about high school girls. Replace the dry wit and practically horizontal lack of aspiration of Ghost World with burning desire. The burning desire to be great actresses, in a meaningful movie that captures the essence of burning desire. Take a novel that caused an indecency trial known as Canada’s Lady Chatterley. Adapt freely, updating it to a nineties boarding school. Work in falconry, Anthony and Cleopatra, and 'issues'. Soundtrack with mournful contemporary singer-songwriters. Call it Lost And Delirious and cast three poutsome Bright Young Things. Dress in hockey skirts and knee socks, especially on the poster.

Did we get hot under the collar? Maybe a little. After all, Piper Perabo and Jessica Pare are the hottest screen couple since Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly, even if they seem a little confused about what lesbian sex might entail. But it was more a case of hot around the eyes than hot under the collar. If the movie reveals any secrets about what seventeen year old girls do in private, it’s the secret of how they love: not the stuff of the Penthouse letter page, but of the Seventeen letter page. It’s a melodrama that’s perfectly fitted to its subject: you never doubt for one second that Paulie is experiencing Tori’s rejection as the end of the world, because, for the duration of the movie, you too are seventeen, and it is. Perhaps the bravest scene is five minutes of Paulie (Perabo) sobbing on the window ledge to the sound of Ani Difranco’s 'You Had Time'. OK, it’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s true. Ghost World, for all its candour, doesn’t come close to the raw intimacy of that scene. Enid and Becky’s awkwardness is cool enough to make us want to have emulated them; Paulie’s heartbreak, and Tori’s cruelty, remind us – embarrass us into remembering – who we actually were.

And I’m not sure where the movies and I can go from there. The big screen’s always served to remind us that it knows all our dirty secrets, but it’s usually the job of bittersweet pop to expose them in public. But Lost And Delirious, like Paulie in her final fencing duel, cuts close. Its melodrama appeals to the melodramatic side of us, and appals the other side. But Paulie’s world is not a ghost world. It is as vivid in love as in despair, a vividness all too rarely found in the ironic and self-referential cinema bequeathed to us by Tarantino and subsequent Swingers. In the classic era of matinees, war films were patriotic and celebratory; romances were melodramatic and cathartic; and screwball comedies were about adults, and ended in marriage. Now war films are melodramatic and cathartic, romances are ironic, and screwball comedies teach us how to be independent women. 'Cool' and 'chilled' may be words of approbation, especially in these Planet of the Aphids dog-days of summer, but reheated irony is tasteless at best. Lost And Delirious may be closer to lesbian pulp novels than to Gone With the Wind, but at least it won’t leave you feeling cold.

Sophie Levy