A lesbian RomCom that doesn't suck more than your average RomCom...rock on!

Having realized just how little downtime I'd been giving myself and the fact that I'd been neglecting my girlfriend horribly, I decided to do something I hadn't done in a long time, watch a movie.

We got Imagine Me & You through Netflix, and I was skeptical. The Netflix description said:

In this delightful romantic comedy that gives new meaning to the term cold feet , bride-to-be Rachel (Piper Perabo) is love-struck ... but not with her groom. Instead, as she's marching down the aisle with her longtime sweetheart, Heck (Matthew Goode), Rachel is immediately bewitched by a beautiful guest (Lena Headey). Now, the newlywed must choose between the safety of a familiar relationship and her heart's true desire.

Not a lot in the description and I wasn't sure if it was going to be bad or really bad, but the girlfriend had put it on the queue so I figured we'd watch it.

It turned out to be pretty good, considering it was a romantic comedy (a genre I do not have the highest esteem for). It managed to avoid most, if not all, of the major pitfalls of any movie focused around a lesbian relationship. (warning spoilers below, if you actually think you'll ever watch the movie and don't want me to spoil the ending, stop reading now!)

First of all, it didn't end tragically, I'll tell you that now. No one died, no one got savagely beaten, or any of that (ala Brokeback Mountain).
Also very importantly no one got reclaimed as a heterosexual (WHICH I HATE!!!!). The women do, in fact, end up together, and while this makes "Rachel's" husband sad, he's the one who does the right thing and tells her to go make herself happy, he also finally does what he's always been wanting to do (namely quitting his soul-killing job and traveling to write a travel book, plus he gets hit on by a sexy lady on the plane during credits, so he'll be fine).
It also showed parents who accepted (albeit to varying degrees) their daughter's sexuality. Which is really nice from the whole "rejected by family" subplot that often crops up.
And finally, it wasn't a jumped up soft-core porn about "girly sex", no extended scenes with billowing draperies and girls in lacy little panties rolling around giggling and tickling each other. While that may be how some women have sex (I did see a craigslist post for exactly that, I'm guessing a first time bisexual, but maybe I'm just biased) but it certainly isn't how I have sex, or, from what I've heard, how any of my lesbian friends have sex either. I hate those sort of representations of lesbian sex because they support the straight cultural theory that lesbians don't or can't *really* have sex. In fact sex wasn't really dealt with cinematically, it was discussed, but no one seemed to be having much of it, the movie was more about love and relationships. The only scene that even boarder on sex involved the two women kissing for the first time, they're in the back of the one's shop (she's a florist) and they tumble into a bed of roses and I'm going "Oh god, not this bullshit" but then the one on the bottom starts going "OW! OW! THORNS!" and it breaks up the whole moment and makes fun of the whole "bed of flowers" thing quite satisfactorily.

I'm not saying it was a great movie. It was a romantic comedy and an English one at that, which means with was filled with lots of very British awkward moments. It also had that really unfortunate sound balance that a lot of British cinema tends to have. You know, where the soundtrack and the background noise are all too loud and the dialogue is all too low, making it even harder to understand when people are speaking in those particularly soft British accents. But what made me happy about the movie was that the bad parts were largely unrelated to the lesbian love plot. You don't see that often enough at all.