Starring: Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, David Hyde Pierce
Director: Peyton Reed
Rated: M15+
FOR those nostalgic for the Doris Day and Rock Hudson romantic comedies of yesteryear, Down with Love is the film for you.
In 1963 aspiring writer Barbara Novak (Renee Zellweger) arrives in the Big Apple to sell her manuscript. She meets with disappointment until PR guru Vicky Hillen (Sarah Paulson) takes Novak under her wing.
She makes her book, Down with Love, a bestseller. In it Novak tells women that while they may need and like men, they should not become dependent on them, and never fall in love.
Award-winning journalist and man-about-town Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor) sets out to seduce Novak and expose to the world that she really is a romantic fraud.
Down with Love is a pastiche. Tightly crafted and carefully choreographed, it is an affectionate look back at the scores of films which had glamorous women being romantically rescued by dashing leading men.
Director Peyton Reed, whose name conjures up images of Peyton Place, re-creates the period and its films with meticulous detail.
It’s not just the art design, set dressing, stunning costumes and musical score that add to the atmosphere, but also the deliberate and highly stylised mannerisms borrowed from the film conventions of the fifties and early sixties.
Editor Larry Bock’s cutting between archival and contemporary shots adds greatly to the overall effect.
And while Down With Love might be a homage, it is not just quaint, light and fun. It traces over the roots of modern-day feminism and the reasons why we need a movement for the sensitive new age guy.
In the most unexpected of turns it also ends up arguing for loving relationships that are committed, monogamous and married.
Down with Love is filled with quotations from the sorts of films that more mature viewers will enjoy spotting, and shamelessly borrows motifs from James Bond and Austin Powers that will engage younger audiences as well.
The four leading actors combine to give quality performances in a clever and enjoyable journey to an era which casts light on the here and now.
