YEAR: 2005
DIRECTOR: Ol Parker
KEY ACTORS: Piper Perabo, Lena Headey, Matthew Goode, Celia Imrie, Anthony Head
CERTIFICATE: 12
IMDB SCORE: 6.8
ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 34%
I’m so happy to be posting another guest post from another fabulous sex blogger, Amy Norton from Coffee and Kink! Amy writes hot erotica, detailed sex toy reviews and insightful personal essays – do go and check out her writing!
SEX SCORE: 4.5/5
✔️ Passes the Bechdel Test with flying colours. Main characters Rachel and Luce are shown talking about a wide range of topics from flowers to football.
✔️ Fuckable cast – Lena Headey (yes, as in Cersei Lannister) as a dorky lesbian florist? Sign me the fuck up. Piper Perabo is also super hot. The men don’t really do anything for me; Matthew Goode’s Heck is cute enough but not my type, and Darren Boyd’s Cooper is way too obnoxious to be hot.
❓Fantasies inspired – Half a point here. No specific sexual fantasies from this one (there’s hardly any actual sex in it!) but definitely plenty of romantic fantasies. This movie was the first piece of media which gave me hope that queer women, too, could have cinema-worthy mushy happy endings.
✔️ Rewatchable – Endlessly. I’ve probably seen this film at least a dozen times by now, and it’s a frequent cheer-me-up choice when I’m sad or sick.
✔️ Sex positive – This was difficult to decide. I’m torn primarily because there’s a major theme about cheating, which is hard to classify as sex-positive. However, it’s also a story about following your heart when your sexuality turns out to not be quite what you thought, and it’s unashamedly queer-positive (despite coming out only two years after the end of Section 28.) So, yes, it gets the point.
As ever, this post contains spoilers, so watch the film before you read on…
STREAMING: Shockingly, this film is on neither Netflix nor Amazon Prime. It is available on Sky for £3.49, or you can buy the DVD for around £5 on Amazon. For a full list of streaming options, check out JustWatch.com
When I was an undergraduate, a decade or so ago, we had monthly LGBTQ film nights. As a baby queer of nineteen, I’d seen almost no LGBTQ cinema before. These evenings introduced me to some films which I still love years later. One of them was Imagine Me and You, a British queer rom-com starring Piper Perabo as Rachel, a young newly-wed who feels inexplicably drawn to florist Luce at her wedding… and eventually begins to wonder if the love of her life might not be her new husband, Hector (“Heck”), after all.
There isn’t much actual sex in this movie (it’s only a 12 certificate, after all!) It’s really a film about the fluidity of sexuality, and about sexual and romantic tension rather than sex itself. But that’s part of what makes it so delicious! Rachel’s attraction to Luce is immediate and overpowering, and she spends much of the movie (which spans a period of a few months) trying desperately to deny her growing feelings. That said, sex is alluded to plenty, including in some of the movie’s most memorable moments:
Heck: [When Rachel wants to have sex in a park late at night] “We’ve got a flat. It’s a good one! And I’ve confiscated your mother’s key so she can’t sneak up on us any more. I swear that woman’s got a sex radar.”
In this scene, Rachel and Heck run into a gay male couple who also seem to be getting ready to have sex in the woods. The two men explain that they have only just met, and there’s a hilarious, excruciatingly awkward handshake and exchange of names. (This movie does painful awkwardness so, so well – just search Youtube for “Imagine Me & You supermarket scene” to see what I mean.) This film even manages to poke fun at outdated puritanical beliefs about the supposed “degrading and offensive” nature of pornography:
Heck: [After nearly catching Rachel watching a lesbian porn film she has “accidentally” rented from the video store] It’s porn, right? It’s degrading. It’s offensive.
Rachel: God, yes.
Heck: Yeah… Let’s watch it anyway! Come on, Rach, I mean, things have been getting slack in that department recently. I know it’s my fault, but…
Rachel: No, it’s mine… I… uh… but I don’t want to watch this.
Heck: Why not?
Rachel: It doesn’t turn me on.
Heck: Makes one of us.
We’re also reminded of the hypocrisy of the heteropatriarchy in the form of Heck’s best friend, Cooper. “Coop” is an obnoxious womanizer who believes himself “the cure for lesbianism” and proudly boasts about all the married women who have cheated with him. (Real talk: in reality, these two men would never be best friends. They have nothing in common!) However, when Heck confides that Rachel has fallen in love with someone else, Coop realises the person in question is Luce and doesn’t hesitate to chew her out for “wrecking another couple.” Please remember: Luce and Rachel have shared exactly one kiss by this point in the film, and Rachel has tried to end things and decided to stay with her husband. Coming from a man whose answer to the question of what to do if you like someone who’s already in a relationship is, “me? I shag ‘em”… the hypocrisy and double standards are thrown into sharp relief here. Luce, to her credit, basically tells him to fuck off.
But again: the sex jokes are fun and the movie occasionally makes a serious point about sex, but this is really a film about the slow burn of sexual and romantic tension leading to blossoming love. Rachel and Luce repeatedly find themselves in each other’s orbit – ironically, Heck keeps making efforts to throw them together, thinking that Rachel could use more female friendships in her life. There are a number of moments where something so nearly happens, and then doesn’t. In one particularly exquisite and painful moment, the two women come inches away from kissing at the end of an evening out together, until Rachel breaks the spell and runs off.
When I watch this scene I am always viscerally reminded of times, before I was quite ready to come out, when I might have had the opportunity to kiss a girl but wasn’t yet able to deal with what it could mean about me if I did. Experiences like this are, I think, a near -ubiquitous part of the coming out process. I’m sure that’s why so many young queer women say they see themselves represented in this film. As the newly-out, newly-adult queer woman I was when I watched this film, Rachel’s coming-out story resonated profoundly with me. It still does.
The tension and slowly escalating pull Rachel and Luce feel to each other is so beautifully executed that when they do finally kiss, it brings tears to my eyes every single time. A heartbroken Rachel tells Luce they can no longer see each other because she is married, goes to leave… then rushes back into Luce’s flower shop and kisses her passionately. This scene is hot, tender and funny (“Thorns! Thorns in my bum!”) all at the same time. Just like the best sex, the best kisses and the best relationships in real life.
And this is of the reasons the Rachel/Luce relationship is so compelling. They genuinely seem to like each other! Laughter is a major part of their interactions. Despite its unusual beginnings and the strange circumstances, their relationship seems based on genuine affection, mutual respect, and a deep sense of fun and friendship.
Films need conflict, of course. Otherwise there is no story. But the conflict in Imagine Me & You exists internally for each of the characters – Rachel as she battles with her changing sexuality, Luce as she struggles with the guilt over loving a married woman. Their relationship itself, though? It consistently strikes me as one of the healthiest on-screen romantic relationships I can think of, gay or straight.
Speaking of conflict, I do need to address the “cheating” element of this story. Having been on the wrong end of it, I feel comfortable saying I take a harder line on cheating than most. And, yes, Rachel does cheat on Heck in this film. What redeems it for me, though, is that the film does not glorify or romanticise cheating. Rachel fights her attraction to Luce every single step of the way and attempts to put physical distance between them when it seems that something is about to happen. Luce doesn’t push her to do anything, and also wrestles with her own guilt for wanting someone who is already married… even to the point of nearly leaving the country to put distance between them when she believes Rachel has chosen to stay with Heck.
When the two women do share that amazing kiss in the flower shop (and are nearly caught by Heck, coming at precisely the wrong moment to buy some flowers for his wife,) Rachel realises what she is doing and again tries to put an end to it. Later, she tearfully confesses to her husband.
“I went crazy, Heck. I went crazy for someone and it wasn’t you.”
Additionally, the scene where Rachel and Heck eventually split up is heartbreaking – for both of them. Heck, and their marriage, are not treated as disposable or easy to throw aside in favour of the “new shiny.” They genuinely love and care about each other! However, Rachel has come to understand something new and profound about herself and her sexuality, which is incompatible with the continuation of their marriage. Heck, I think, realises this very clearly while Rachel is still vainly trying to deny it to herself. He chooses to step aside, over allowing his wife to stay with him out of guilt or a sense of obligation when her heart is elsewhere. To me, it’s his last act of profound love towards her.
“What you’re feeling now, Rachel, is the unstoppable force. Which means I’ve got to move.”
I think this storyline represents an extremely common experience for queer people in opposite-sex relationships who cheat or who break up with their spouse for a same-sex partner. The new love, the new understanding of sexuality, does not negate what came before or make it somehow less real. It’s a difficult, painful, heart-wrenching decision to make. It’s wrapped up in guilt, loss, shame and fear of leaving the known for the unknown. And this film just shows that reality so beautifully.
Finally, this storyline gets a pass from me because it neatly avoids two tropes: bisexual women as serial cheaters (she does it once and she feels terrible about it!) and the idea that the husband should be chill with the affair because relationships and sex between women “don’t count.”
Thinking about it, avoiding tired queer cinema tropes is one of the things this film does best and one of the reasons I love it.
My best friend and I like to watch LGBTQ films together. Last time we did this, we challenged ourselves to find queer films that featured none of: Death of any queer characters; violent homophobia; an AIDS storyline. It was shockingly difficult to find anything (my favourite film of all time, Pride, doesn’t clear this test either but gets a pass for being a true story.) I don’t want to diminish the fact that these things are all big, important, painful things to grapple with, which were and are a major part of collective queer history. However… we don’t necessarily always need to see that misery on-screen All The Fucking Time.
“Bury Your Gays” is a trope many of us are sick of, and lesbian and bisexual women often get the worst of it. (It’s almost like homophobic patriarchy views queer women as expendable, or somehow only acceptable when made into tragic figures.) Imagine Me & You turns all that on its head. Instead, we get two happy women kissing in the middle of a busy street while a love-song plays, and then having a stable and functional relationship.
I might be a tad jaded in many ways, but I’m a hopeless romantic at heart and a sucker for a happy ending. I love so many things about Imagine Me & You but one of them is that everyone – including Heck, Rachel’s now ex-husband – gets a happy ending. And goddess knows we need more happy endings.
Next week: Up in the Air
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