Hard To Imagine

I can't get enough of you... or the smell of your hair: From left, Luce (Lena Headey) and Rachel (Piper Perabo) in Imagine Me & You. Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox.

Every filmmaking hub has its strengths. Hong Kong has its bloody, balletic action movies, Iran has political message films cloaked as children’s stories and Brazil has social realist dramas. For the last decade, Britain has become a factory for fizzy, offbeat romantic comedies. Like Ikea furniture, they are ubiquitous but appealing, serviceable but flimsy, predictable but with a veneer of oddball hipness. Screenwriter and director Richard Curtis is the master of the genre, having populated Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually and Bridget Jones’s Diary with dotty fathers, foul-mouthed pensioners, posh ladies in big hats, enviable real estate, snappy banter and stammering man-child male leads.

Enter Ol Parker, a British screenwriter (Loved Up) making his uninspired directorial debut with Imagine Me & You, a paint-by-numbers British rom-com about love at first sight — this one with a lesbian twist. Walking down the aisle to marry her longtime boyfriend, Rachel (Coyote Ugly’s Piper Perabo, with a passable British accent) briefly locks eyes with sexy wedding florist Luce (Lena Headey). And before you can say “Anne Heche!” it’s true love. Of course, there’s a little problem keeping them apart: namely, Rachel’s nice-guy groom Heck, played by Match Point’s Matthew Goode, an amiable hybrid of Hugh Grant and Mark Ruffalo.

Along the way to their inevitable — or as Parker would have it, fated — lip lock, Rachel and Luce become friends, enduring a series of awkward dinner parties, cute chance encounters and tense moments with their respective dysfunctional families. Curtis’s influence is apparent in Parker’s choice of setting: North London’s trendy and bucolic Primrose Hill, a neighbourhood seemingly overrun with charming kooks. Among them are Rachel’s mismatched parents — Anthony Head plays the bumbling father, Celia Imrie the nitpicking mother — and her precocious young sister (newcomer Boo Jackson, a freckled munchkin from the Jonathan Lipnicki school of child actors). And then there’s Coop, Heck’s skirt-chasing best friend, whose response to the news of Luce’s lesbianism is an up-for-the-challenge “Cool!” These secondary characters provide some laughs. When Heck pointedly asks one of Luce’s friends if she’s gay as well, the woman grins, “Me? I’m ecstatic.” Ultimately, though, these folks don’t add up to more than exhaustingly whimsical window dressing.

Don't tell me you forgot your lines: Heck (Matthew Goode) and his soon-to-be ex-wife. Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox.

As their mutual attraction slowly grows, Rachel and Luce struggle to deny it. Neither of them wants to hurt Heck. And by making Heck such a decent, caring husband, Parker paints himself into a corner. A better script and a stronger actress might have made Rachel sympathetic even as she breaks Heck’s heart. But Perabo’s Rachel is a cipher. Blandly pretty, she is supposed to be a vivacious spitfire — she heckles soccer players and impulsively buys an expensive couch — but comes across as whiny and self-absorbed. For the audience, the even bigger obstacle is the less-than-zero chemistry between the leads. Both actresses seem game enough; as a lovelorn lesbian, Headey looks the part, with her L Word-inspired girlie tattoos and artfully tousled hair. But even their first meeting comes across less as a thunderclap of instant love than a quizzical “don’t I know you from somewhere” passing glance.

Worse still, the film goes out of its way to avoid making sexual orientation an issue. Parker seems to have the best of intentions: love is blind and gender shouldn’t make a bit of difference. Trouble is, it does. In a world where Elton John, the Queen of England himself, can marry his boyfriend, it’s utterly inconceivable that Rachel wouldn’t take a moment’s pause to consider the consequences of leaving behind the safe, upscale trappings of her heterosexual life. Or that Luce wouldn’t fret about being nothing more than a sexual experiment for Rachel. Instead, there’s barely an eyebrow raised at the relationship. When Rachel’s mother wonders aloud about grandchildren, she’s quickly placated by her husband’s enthusiasm for turkey basters.

Even Heck can’t muster any resistance to being left for a woman. Ever the gentleman, he quietly steps aside without a fight. Maybe he’s as bored of the premise as the rest of us.

Imagine Me & You opens Feb. 3 in Toronto, Feb. 10 in Vancouver, Feb. 17 in Calgary, Edmonton and Victoria and Feb. 24 in Ottawa, Winnipeg and Halifax.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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