Imagine Me and You

I feel like I should start this blog off with the truth: I love chick flicks. I could go on for a while about how movies about women and “women’s issues” are just as valid and artistically relevant as movies about men, and how our cultural disdain for women and femininity is translated into disdain for movies about women, and how not taking stories about women seriously represents not taking women seriously, how movies about men are seen as universal while movies about women are othered. But what’s really relevant to this entry in the LGBT Movie Project is my extensive knowledge of romantic comedy clichés. Let me say that not all clichés are bad! The makeover montage, as well as the mid-downpour makeout scene, if deployed properly, can be deeply satisfying. But sometimes romcoms are just ninety predictable minutes of lifeless clichés revolving around blandly attractive straight people. When I watch these movies, I think: Would I find this more compelling if it were about gay people?

So I watched Imagine Me and You and learned: eh, not really.

Imagine Me and You is a 2005 movie about a British woman (Rachel) who falls passionately in love with her lesbian florist (Luce) while walking down the aisle. In 94 minutes, they encounter: precocious children, precocious children in love, milquetoast significant others, old people that have parallel storylines about the nature of love and seizing the day. They have weirdly intense arguments about the nature of love within hours of meeting, only talk to their friends about each other, hang out under fireworks, have humorous misunderstandings about porn, insist that the other wears her coat in the rain, have epiphanies about their true feelings just in time to stop the other from catching her flight, and the film climaxes with one of them publically declaring her love for the other, aided by another character singing a classic pop song. Also, Rachel appears to be a journalist of some sort.

Maybe the most interesting thing about Imagine Me and You is how little hand-wringing there is over Rachel’s sudden apparent bisexuality. The issue isn’t that Rachel is queer, it’s that she fell in love with someone else after marrying her perfectly nice husband. There is one bizarre scene where Luce and a friend see Rachel at the grocery store, and the friend tells Luce it’s totally hopeless: “She’s not just heterosexual, she’s Barbie heterosexual.” Luce looks like this:


The vest and ponytail is how you know she's a Barbie lesbian, not a Barbie heterosexual.

I also like how the movie doesn’t shy away from how awful Rachel is to poor Hector. I mean, his wife runs off with the florist from their wedding in, like, three weeks, based solely on having good chemistry. That sucks. I find it really interesting that the movie doesn’t use Rachel’s somewhat ambiguous sexual orientation as an excuse for cheating on Hector, or paint Rachel as some kind of repressed lesbian who was in denial. She’s just unsure of who she is and what she wants. Imagine Me and You doesn’t define its characters by their genders: Rachel can be more assertive than her husband, who can cook and be great with children, and anyone can have romantic comedy clichés happen to them, which is a step in the right direction.