I can’t even count the number of masterlists of lesbian movies I’ve come across that have preambles along the lines of “what else is there to watch besides Imagine Me and You?” It’s at once the quintessential lesbian movie and the most basic one, a fairly straightforward (heh) romcom. By all rights, I should find it incredibly annoying. Most of the time, I find romcoms in general to be hackneyed and tropey. The whole plot of Imagine Me and You hinges on infidelity. It would have been really nice if somebody, one person in the whole movie, had said the word “bisexual” with regards to Rachel. Everybody gets paired off in the end; even Rachel’s tiny kid sister gets a tiny kid crush on a boy. (Compulsory heterosexuality: it comes for the kids early.) Cooper, especially, is an intensely problematic character -- not only is he a stereotypical overgrown fratboy horndog, but for far too long he remains convinced that he’ll be Luce’s lesbian exception. That alone should irritate me, a consummate But Actually This Is Sexist moviegoer, to the point where I can’t even think about the movie without groaning.
And yet I still love this movie. I’ve rewatched it probably six times, and I don’t rewatch movies often. I can’t keep from giggling, actually giggling, every single time I watch it. Just over the past half-hour or so, while I’ve been drafting this article, I even caught myself happy-sighing.
God, why the hell do I like this stupid movie so much?
You’d think, given that I basically have a degree in writing elaborate thinkpieces about literature and movies and gay stuff in general (see also: the three separate papers I wrote in undergrad on Twelfth Night), that I’d be able to articulate why I’m so attached to this movie. I’ve been trying to come up with something profound to say, some deeper meaning that I can tap into, for quite a long time, and yet the best I can come up with is a scattered assortment of observations. The flower shop AU (stands for alternate universe) is a staple of basically any fandom ever, and this movie is nothing if not a flower shop AU come to life. The mid-2000s fashion throwbacks are still somehow adorable. The British setting somehow, God knows how, makes everything feel more genuine. The movie is filled with phenomenal actors who, somehow, have all perfected the art of seeming like completely normal, good-hearted people. I adore all those little things about the movie -- but those have never felt like enough of a justification.
I’ve been trying to tell myself the whole time I’ve been wrestling with this that despite my English-major training, I don’t always have to cook up some passionate, eloquent justification for liking things. It’s okay to like something for entirely superficial reasons, or for no particular reason at all. I know that objectively, but it hasn’t yet stopped me from trying to justify my love for this movie, or from being frustrated that I can’t seem to find some deeper meaning in it.
Imagine Me and You isn’t some broody, emotionally charged and conflict-filled cinematic masterpiece like Carol, or A Single Man. I could make English-major hay with both of those. Hell, I could even write a treatise on color theory in the shamelessly campy But I’m a Cheerleader. Imagine Me and You just… well, is. It’s such a shallow, conventionally scripted and shot movie -- but maybe that’s the whole point of it. It’s simple and genuine because queer love can be simple and genuine. And maybe, in an era when fictional lesbians are dying on TV at truly frightening rates, a simple, genuine lesbian romcom -- queer happiness -- is exactly the sort of queer resistance we need.
