Imagine Me & You (2006)

Imagine Me & You arrives from 2006 with the soft tread of a British romantic comedy that has no interest in disturbing anyone's afternoon. Rachel, newly married to the affable Heck, locks eyes with a florist named Luce at her own wedding and spends the rest of the running time negotiating what that glance meant. The machinery is familiar: rain-soaked balconies, a workaholic husband, a wisecracking cad named Coop, a mother who will not stop planning things. The distinguishing feature is a destination that happens to be a woman, and the film commits to it without apology or hand-wringing.

This is a same-sex romance placed at the center of a mainstream release, and the film treats Rachel's reckoning with her sexuality as the engine of the plot, not a subplot to be tolerated. It is, in its quiet way, a genuine landmark for that. The casting, though, stays firmly within the pale confines of North London. The ensemble is white to a person, with a single Black actress appearing in the closing moments as a seatmate on a plane. There is no racial texture here, no environmental conscience, no critique of wealth, no interest in bodies or brains that deviate from the norm. The film wants to tell a love story and little else.

Its progressive instincts are romantic, not rhetorical. Nobody stands on a soapbox. The politics, such as they are, live in Rachel's decision to leave a kind man for a woman she barely knows, and the screenplay declines to punish her for it. That is a modest act of grace. The result is a pleasant, slight, occasionally clumsy confection that has aged into a minor canon of lesbian cinema precisely because it refused to argue for its own existence. It simply existed, and for 2006, that was sufficient.

It will not convert the skeptical, and it was never built to. It offers a warm room, a few good jokes, and one clear-eyed glance across a crowded aisle. The sommelier notes a soft finish, low tannins, and no lingering aftertaste of sermon. Recommended for a rainy Sunday and nothing more strenuous than that.