Gay & Lesbian

This begins in typical Brit rom-com fashion, with a wedding attended by posh, good-looking Londoners. But writer-director Ol Parker soon gives a same-sex twist to the genre when bride-to-be Rachel (Piper Perabo) falls in love at the first sight of florist Lucy (Lena Headey), while walking to the altar where her fiancé Heck (Matthew Goode) is waiting. So begins Rachel’s tentative romance with Lucy and her gradual falling out of love with the decent but dull hubby.

Set in an upmarket patch of NW1 ‘Imagine Me and You’ is a glossy attempt to combine Richard Curtis-style jokes about British diffidence with the sexual-identity-crisis comedy of ‘Kissing Jessica Stein’. But the film lacks the sparkle of Curtis’s best work and its treatment of Rachel’s attraction for Lucy is strangely coy. But the American Perabo (doing a good English accent) and Headey are likable leads – and Goode brings a touching vulnerability to his role as the luckless Heck. If they ever remake ‘Brief Encounter’, he’d be great as the spurned husband.