Imagine Me & You

Are You Gay?

Me and you and you and me
No matter how they toss the dice, it has to be
The only one for me is you, and you for me
So happy together

I can't see me lovin' nobody but you
For all my life
When you're with me, baby the skies'll be blue
For all my life
- Happy Together, The Turtles

I'm not sure if that bubblegum tune can belong amongst the gay anthems, given that Wong Kar Wai's had a gay themed movie titled Happy Together and used the same song too. Yes well, as you would already know, GLBT movies from UK are emerging, from Kinky Boots earlier (one of my faves for the year), and now Imagine Me & You hitting our shores next week.

Rachel (Piper Perabo, a dead ringer for Rachel McAdams) and Hector (Matthew Goode, from Match Point) are about to get married after years of courtship. On their wedding day, Rachel notices Luce (Lena Headey) from the corner of her eye, and from brief introductions turned into family gatherings, turned into something more. Rachel experiences strange feelings for Luce and the feelings turned out to be mutual, but what about Hector? It's a classic case of everyone's worst nightmare come true, finding out that the person you're about to marry, or have married, actually loves somebody else, and that someone else being the same sex just compounds the effect.

One character said in passing that anybody can swing to the other camp, before a slight hesitation, correcting that only probably he wouldn't. And that made an interesting caveat which the movie explores - how do you know if your sexual orientation is rock solid (that might seem a "d'uh" statement until you watch the movie), or do you have the tendency to swing (think Kinsey had a theory on this). What if you find yourself experiencing this inexplicable force of feelings you never knew for someone else, when you're already married or with a life partner?

And speaking of life partners, how do you know the one you're with, is the one for you? And life partners being partners, must it always be in matrimony or strictly about the opposite sex? At the end of the day, what matters is the chemistry and the ability to click, right? The movie asks a lot of these questions beneath its cheerful yet melancholic veneer, although it never provides a straight answer.

As always, you can replace the lesbian relationship here in the story with a heterosexual one, but it probably won't impact an audience as much (just as Brokeback Mountain would work with a heterosexual couple, but will bore the heck out of audiences and not win any award at all). While the movie offers to suggest certain ideas like love at first sight, it doesn't really demonstrate that effectively (more like lust at first sight) nor seemed to have a valid reason to do so, though it toyed with the fleeting thought about reincarnation.

You might feel that writer-director Ol Parker had filled the movie with plenty of romantic cliches and notions about setting someone free if you really love them, or the thought about being with someone you can live without rather than someone you can live with. In fact, the entire premise might be a bit contrived, but hey, if you think about it, the world is full of quirky events and people, so maybe something like this could happen too.

This movie should do reasonable well amongst the GLBT crowd with its theme, and given the eye candy cast, probably will do well as a whole. It's nothing spectacular, just that as a movie, it should work the crowd like clockwork with its many one liners and universal romantic theme.