Imagine Me and You (2005)
The 50% bi rom-com with the 100% lesbian label that once resisted being called 'gay' at all
Ol Parker’s take on the British rom-com formula emerged onto screens amidst a fascinating cultural atmosphere. Released just after same-sex civil partnerships became legal in the UK, it was still a time when reporters felt comfortable asking the stars of the film if they thought playing a gay woman would ruin their career1. A rarity for its era in its depiction of a queer relationship outside of a death-marred tragedy, Imagine Me and You has held a special place in the queer canon for many people. However, despite depicting a relationship between a bi woman and a lesbian, the former sexual orientation is rarely mentioned in reviews and comments. So let’s dive into this quaint little story and the surrounding media that may be preventing it from achieving full visibility.
This essay will contain spoilers. But it’s a rom-com, so if you know the formula, you know where this is going.
Film Details
Director: Ol Parker
Writer: Ol Parker
Stars: Piper Perabo, Lena Headey, Matthew Goode
Genres: Romantic Comedy
Theatrical Release Date: Jan 2006 (USA), June 2006 (UK)
Country and Language: UK, English
Running time: 1hr 30min
Setting the scene
Let me take you back to 20062. It’s the year action and adventure fans will devour the blockbusters Casino Royale and the second instalment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, while kids will go wild for the first season of Hannah Montana on Disney Channel. Rihanna will release SOS, and an unknown country music star will release her self-titled album, Taylor Swift, in October. It’s been a year since Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston divorced, and Angelina Jolie will welcome her first biological child with Pitt in May3. But for you, sitting in a plush cinema seat to get away from the cold on a frosty January day in the US, this is all months away.
There has been a queer cinema buzz in the film world this new year as, just a few weeks ago, Brokeback Mountain (2005, Ang Lee) hit screens to wild fanfare, stirring up talks about gay rights and homophobia. As you sit here now, dipping into that bucket of buttered popcorn while the trailers roll, only one state in the US has legalised same-sex marriage. Universal marriage laws would still be almost a decade away for both the USA and UK. Progress has been slow, but the cogs have turned enough that your mainstream options for seeing a film about queer people at the cinema are not limited to the beautiful yet tragic tale of Brokeback’s lovers. No, you’re here to see a rom-com.
Director Ol Parker expressed he wanted to write a film about ‘the worst place you could fall in love at first sight’4, and so we open with Rachel (Piper Perabo) as she gets ready for her wedding to partner and best friend Heck (Matthew Goode). After last-minute preparations scramble together and we get a taste of the ancillary characters (a promiscuous best man, a wise-beyond-her-years child, a terse mother, and a dispirited father), Rachel floats down the aisle to her admiring husband-to-be, catching the eyes of supportive family and friends as she goes and, unexpectedly, the eye of the wedding’s florist Luce (Lena Headey), who she instantly falls in love with. Timing is a bitch.
Shaking this moment off, Rachel marries Heck and then embarks on igniting a friendship with Luce, soon revealed to be a lesbian who also fell for Rachel at first sight. Throughout the film, Luce and Rachel grapple with their feelings towards each other. Sparks fly. Covert kisses are had. The Turtle’s song plays. All the usual jazz.
Despite the depiction of two women in love being very unique for this time in mainstream rom-coms, there is no clumsy fumbling in the narrative over what this means about anyone’s sexual identity. There is no internal homophobia within the film5 and no sensationalising of the fact that Rachel has fallen for a woman. While she does have a couple of moments of exploring this within herself, including a scene where she rents porn from a DVD shop (what a throwback concept), her main struggle is over her marriage and not wanting to hurt Heck, as opposed to a fierce existential questioning of what this means about who she is. This allows the rom-com formula to continue on with ease, rather than getting bogged down in a dramatic form that could have easily confused the tone6.
From quippy and quirky run-ins through the aisles of a supermarket to Luce holding her arms around Rachel to teach her how to harness her voice in order to scream obscenities at footballers, this film really shows that queer romance can be just like any other.
“It’s not really about two girls getting together but just two people that were sort of meant to be together. Hopefully we can get everyone there…and you don’t even realise it’s two girls until you’re walking out of the cinema”
Resisting the ‘gay’ label
What is interesting about framing the relationship as a romance like any other is how, during the release, this seemed to occasionally fall into a resistance to being labelled a ‘gay’ film at all. To contextualise this a bit, for mainstream cinema in 2006 there was still a very fixed idea of what a ‘gay’ film would be (often something tragic or salacious), and marketers worried branding a film as such would alienate straight audiences7. Gay content also tended to be given more restrictive classifications than straight content, particularly in the US8.
Imagine Me and You was given an R rating in the USA (and a 12A in the UK). While Roger Ebert asserted that this was most likely to do with the British penchant for swearing rather than sexual content, he did comment that things would be different if the couple in the film were heterosexual:
“If Rachel and Luce were of opposite genders, what they do together would be rated PG-13, and they’d have to hold on tight to keep from sliding into PG”.9
To further that point, let’s compare the rating of this film to a heterosexual 2006 rom-com, Failure to Launch (Tom Dey, 2006):
Films with gay content were also few and far between in the mainstream at this time, which could lead to conflation and comparison of films that really had little in common aside from featuring a queer relationship. It’s this conflict that is reflected very heavily in cast interviews featured on the DVD extras of the film10, which often led to rejection of the idea of Imagine Me and You being a ‘gay’ film at all11.
“Last month we had the ‘gay cowboy film’. Now here’s what will likely be labelled the ‘lesbian rom-com’”.
The two questions the cast expressed they had been repeatedly asked about the film were, ‘do you believe in love at first sight?’ and some kind of question around how this film relates to Brokeback Mountain. In an interview with Piper Perabo and Lena Headey12, they were asked what questions had been posed to them on the press tour so far, to which Perabo says:
“‘aren’t you excited that Brokeback Mountain is doing so well?’, and ‘are you excited to be in a gay film?’ And we say we’re not in a gay film. We have no horses and this is a love story…I don’t think of it as a gay film really”.
Aside from making me question whether horses = gay, what stands out is the assertion that Imagine Me and You is a ‘love story’ and therefore cannot be a ‘gay’ film. My reading of this isn’t that Perabo is claiming she wouldn’t want to be in a film that is considered ‘gay’ (she literally kissed Lena Headey in this one, so she seems cool with that), but that there was a limited language straight audiences used to talk about queer films. The cast consistently reject that the film is about being gay and is instead just about falling in love, even though a gay film could be about that (because this film is, in fact, both gay and about that). Matthew Goode stated “It’s irrelevant it’s another girl. It’s just realistic to a certain extent”13, and Headey described the film as being about “love and timing”14.
Goode’s reaction to this question around gay themes is perhaps a more measured take on what Perabo meant, reflecting that it is reductive to say that Brokeback and Imagine are the same kind of film just because they both centre on queer relationships. He stated he was constantly being asked about the ‘gay thing’ in the movie, with people assuming it is a ‘new genre of movies’15:
“and it’s like not really, it just happens that a few films have come out this year, and they share a similar theme, and they don’t even necessarily share even that.”
Director Ol Parker accepted the queer nature of the film more openly in his interviews16, stating that he knows the film is appreciated by the' “gay and lesbian community” and ‘‘if it makes people feel better about things that are difficult for them, that’s great’’17. Parker would go on to direct Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018), continuing his service to the queer community.
Going all in on the ‘lesbian’ label
If there was an active marketing attempt to get Imagine Me and You away from a ‘gay’ label, it failed miserably. This film has unequivocally been dubbed a classic ‘lesbian film’. In 2024 it made it to number 15 on the ‘top 100 lesbian films of all time’ list by Autostraddle. It’s a word peppered through review after review from the time of the release. Along with the “lesbian rom-com” review from Empire, The Guardian called it a “yuppie romance…gate-crashed by a rogue lesbian element”, and even in 2019 The AV Club billed it as a “lesbian love story”. In the 182 reviews of the film on IMDb posted between 2006 and 2024, the word ‘lesbian’ is used 106 times.
And while the film definitely has a lesbian element (though I wouldn’t have called it “rouge”), that’s only 50% of the elements in the film. Rachel can be pretty easily read as bi, having genuine romantic feelings for Heck and never indicating that she is now only attracted to women (she never specifies her sexual identity at all). Going back to the way the cast talked about the film in 2006, they consistently asserted it was more that Luce was ‘the one’ for Rachel and that gender didn’t factor into attraction for her. So, given that, you would expect there to be a similar number of references to the film’s bi element in reviews, right?
In those 182 IMDb reviews, the word ‘bisexual’ is used twice.18
While some more recent retrospectives of the film have talked about the bi representation19, these framings are still significantly outnumbered. As highlighted in my recent bi-te size bit on ‘Bi-erasure’, an element of that phenomenon is supplanting other queer identities over bi ones and erasing the history of someone’s more varied sexuality in favour of their current sexual interests. This hasn’t just happened with the character of Rachel, but the entire film.
The solution is not to begin re-writing the takes on this movie to declare it completely bi (that would be lesbian erasure). Nor is it to discredit people who find affirmation and identity in the lesbian elements. It isn’t even necessary to erase 100% lesbian interpretations of this film (we all have a right to embark on queering media as we see fit). What the history of Imagine Me and You’s reception tells us is that we need to be using more expansive language when talking about sexual identities so as to not misrepresent or repress some in favour of others. And speaking of misrepresentation…
Cheaters be prospering
As you might have guessed from the central love triangle plot of the film, there is unavoidably some cheating involved. While a pretty standard portion of any love triangle romance film, both queer and heterosexual alike, this trope is disproportionately used in the depiction of bi people across film and TV. Bi people are often depicted as unfaithful, sometimes coupled with an assumption that bi people are inherently untrustworthy because of their attraction to multiple genders20.
Imagine Me and You steers away from more toxic representations of this trope that paint cheating as part of a more deviant nature to the sexuality. Rachel’s cheating isn’t a manipulative means to an end in some kind of grand plot. She is always aware of how much this could impact Heck. But the love triangle itself is also made more complex in this film. Rather than the approach of making one of the corners of the triangle an unlikeable or even abusive figure that audiences don’t feel that bad about leaving in the lurch, Heck is kind, caring, and almost frustratingly understanding. This love triangle subversion is something Goode and Parker speak to as intentional21, and definitely puts some new energy into an old formula. However, in some ways this choice is also fanning the flames of the bi cheating trope. It’s bad enough that Rachel is cheating, but to be cheating on such a nice guy to some might feel like it is further reinforcing harmful stereotypes about the morals of bi people.
None of this was intentional from the filmmakers. Depictions of these tropes are rarely created malevolently with an intentional anti-bi agenda. Most of the time it is done because people aren’t really thinking too deeply about the representation, or because they are thinking more about subverting one kind of representation (in this case, the love triangle) without thinking of how that will lead to cliches in other representations. Or they might just be thinking more about their individual storytelling rather than how that story fits within a wider media landscape. As mentioned in the representation of Patrick’s deviant sexuality in my ramblings about Challengers, these representations on their own also aren’t necessarily bad. You might not even recognise this depiction as falling within a trope if you haven’t seen many other bi films. The issue is more that, as a collective, there are more media representations that reflect these harmful tropes than ones that subvert them. This leaves people with less choice in what depictions they consume about queer relationships and means you will notice them (and become influenced by them) eventually.
We don’t currently have a 90s Hugh Grant equivalent churning out queer romances to satisfy different tropes or plot lines. We make do with what we have, and sometimes what we have isn’t always the most nourishing. Imagine Me and You is cute and fun and as close to a conventional rom-com as you can get, but it’s okay if some of these elements don’t sit right with you.
Final thoughts
If you’re in the mood for an easy watch with some mid-2000s charm, this film has you covered nicely. The Hugh Grant-centric classics of the British rom-com genre had been ticking over for about a decade by the time Imagine Me and You was released, and it delivers on everything you expect from that blueprint:
Set in a London that features shockingly good weather that would only ever become dreary if it suited the tone of the scene
Everyone is posh in a way that’s somehow endearing rather than a grating reminder of the oppressive class system
A featured child character that says strange/comically awkward/weirdly insightful things for her age
Everyone, even the dysfunctionally quirky parents, finds love in the end.
The bi-erasing external dialogue around the film is messy, but we can do something about that. As covered in my babbling on bi erasure, we can talk more about how this is a lesbian and a bi film. Or a ‘queer’ film. Or any other terminology that gives this film the more nuanced description it needs.
The cheating trope won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I appreciate it is a film that gives the most positive spin possible on how that situation could play out. It’s a world where you might have discovered who you are meant to be with at the wrong time, but also a world where everyone accepts you, understands you, and finds their own way of being okay. The cheating causes wounds, but they are temporary, and (without spoiling too many specifics) ultimately everyone is left better off. In an interview for the DVD special features22, Ol Parker comments:
“It’s idealised. But it would be nice to think if you came out to your parents they’d be like that. That all your friends would be that groovy. That your husband that you left forgave you.”
Sometimes, it’s nice to watch a movie that lets us live in that world.
Let’s do this together
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The ‘year’ of the film is considered 2005, when it was first screened at festivals. It was released in theatres in the USA in January 2006 and in the UK in June 2006.
Big shout out to this listicle from Pop Sugar on the pop culture moments of 2006 that gave me visceral flashbacks.
There are a couple of jokes and comments that haven’t aged particularly well, but nothing too egregiously offensive. And in the world of the film they aren’t meant to be harmful or hateful.
This perhaps comes from the fact that the film was originally written with Rachel falling for another man, and was changed in later drafts to be a woman (according to a recount of the DVD commentary with Ol Parker in a Pop Matters article)
San Filippo, Maria. The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television. Indiana University Press, 2013.
Drushel, Bruce E. “Of Letters and Lists: How the MPAA Puts Films Recommended for LGBTQ Adolescents Out of Reach.” Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 67, no. 2, Jan. 2020, pp. 174–88. DOI.org (Crossref)
Thank you to one very committed person who uploaded all of those to YouTube
It should be noted that the comments to follow were made over 20 years ago, and while that doesn’t excuse any stigma they might have reinforced, I am going to roll with the assumption that this is probably not how those involved with the film would talk about it now.
Keep in mind that actors are subjected to a lot more intensity on press tours than directors (most of the time), and would be posed very different questions. So rather than these quotes necessarily being reflective of their respective opinions on queer cinema, it’s likely more reflective of that exhaustion with tedious, sensationalised questioning actors get compared to directors.
There are 4 mentions of the word ‘queer’ as well. Which is still not many. I did also try and search through all 1000+ audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes but my computer got fed up with loading the rest after getting back to the 2008 mark. In the ones I did load, there were 147 mentioned of ‘lesbian’, 0 mentions of ‘bisexual’ and 3 mentions of ‘queer’.
A 2022 retrospective from Little White Lies and a 2021 article from The Mary Sue both use broader LGBTQIA+ language
GLAAD Media Institute. Where We Are on TV 2022-2023. GLAAD Media Institute, 2023,
Waited to watch the movie before reading this and I'm glad I did cos I had a lot of fun with it! I noticed the R rating that popped up when I started my copy but totally forgot about it until you reminded me and, wow, yeah, that's kinda crazy. The little table you made comparing it to Failure to Launch was 👌. Also loved the context you gave at the start!