Down with Love

Down with Love is an entertaining but very low-calorie comedy that is a pastiche of the romantic comedies of the 1950s and 1960s starring, among others, Doris Day and Rock Hudson.

Director Peyton Reed recreates the 1960s in much the same detailed, stylised and slightly kitschy way as Steven Spielberg did in "Catch Me if You Can". The nice girl from the provinces, Barbara Novak, comes to the big city of New York to get her book "Down with Love" published, a reckoning with the existing gender roles that oppress women. Love enslaves women, while sex without love liberates them, is her thesis.

The male chauvinist ladykiller, journalist Catcher Block, sets out to expose Barbara's theses as having no basis in reality. If the authoress herself cannot renounce love, who can? To make Barbara fall in love, he poses as the likeable and upstanding Zip Martin. The question, though, is who is fooling whom.

In its attempt to be as light-footed as possible, Down with Love ends up being one of those films you forget the minute the end credits have rolled across the screen, but it was fun and undemanding while it lasted.