In the twenty years since Imagine Me & You first came out, I have still not figured out if I actually think it’s a good movie. But that doesn’t stop me loving it with every bit of my heart, and, now that Pride Month is upon us (hey, if you’re able, consider donating to Galop, the helpline aimed at aiding LGBTQ people experiencing domestic abuse), I would like to talk a little about the iconic 2005 lesbian romcom of my dreams.
And when I say that, I mean the dreams I was having as a pubescent bisexual girl turning, as I always did, to pop culture to make some sense of the strange new feelings that were beginning to develop. Only problem was, of course, that a lot of media surrounding lesbians and lesbian relationships at the time was more than a little miserable: if it didn’t end with one of them leaping off a roof or admitting that they were truly attracted to men, it would close after a brief period of experimentation with one of them returning to their male partner with a better understanding of herself. Good for her, not so good for the spurned lesbian who turned into a plot point, you know?
Which is where Imagine Me & You comes in. Directed by Ol Parker, the movie follows Rachel (Piper Perabo), a recently-married women who encounters florist Luce (Lena Headey) during her nuptials and is forced to re-consider everything she thought she knew about attraction and love.
And, in a lot of ways, Imagine Me & You is just another fluffy, funny, throwaway little romcom of the early 2000s – comic misunderstandings, sappy proclamations, hands brushing up against each other in the punch bowl. It’s certainly on the stronger end of those movies, for sure – Lena Headey sparkles as Luce, she and Perabo have pretty good chemistry that feels true to their characters, and the backdrop of flowers and florals gives it a wonderfully fresh, vibrant feel. But it’s got pacing problems and script issues and cheesy dialogue and male characters you’d like to feed into a wood chipper, as so many of the romcoms of this era did, so it’s not like it’s some magical hidden gem in terms of quality alone.
But, for me, it is and always will be – because of how it ends. Luce and Rachel embracing in that traffic jam, confessing their feelings for each other, kissing in front of a crowd of people. It’s hard to express what it meant to me to see this kind of story unfold the way it did at the time it came out – to see two women together, and to have it not be a stepping stone to some other, heteronormative story, or the beginning of some tragedy where they’d be torn apart for indulging in their narratively-evil lesbian longings, but to have it stand as its own happy ending. For all its faults and tropes, it felt like something really important – a precious little glimmer of a reminder that loving women could be the entire story.
And, for that, I am eternally grateful to it (even if it gave me a weird thing for florists that I have never truly gotten over). I know I’m not the only one with a slightly-bad LGBTQ-centric movie that helped shape them as a young person, and I would love to hear yours below!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via BBC)
No But Listen 