Power shift starts here

McGregor and Zellweger
10 April 2012

Following Todd Haynes’s stylish tribute to Douglas Sirk movies in Far From Heaven, this is a rather more attractive pastiche of Michael Gordon’s Doris Day/ Rock Hudson feature films. As a calibrated reworking of Sixties style and battle-of-the-sexes text, it would have been amusing enough. But Peyton Reed’s vivacious comedy goes further: it re-enacts the birth of feminism and draws fruitful comparisons with contemporary confusions over gender roles.

Opening with a classic aerial shot of Manhattan, the film wastes no time
in laying out its wares. First-time author Barbara Novak (Renée Zellweger)
arrives from out of town with her potential bestseller, Down With Love. Her
publishing editor, Vikki Hiller (Sarah Paulson), insists that the book will cause a sensation.

An attack on male-dominated society and a clarion call to women to grasp equal opportunities, it runs foul of the imprint’s male-dominated board, but Hiller contrives to get a mention on the Ed Sullivan Show when (the real) Judy
Garland appears to sing the song, Down With Love.

The neurotic editor of a leading men’s magazine, Peter McMannus (David Hyde
Pierce), commissions his leading writer, Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor), to
interview Novak and expose her frailty. Block, a notorious lothario, is expected to seduce Novak. Naturally, things do not go to plan.

Shot in the super-saturated palette of Sixties Technicolor, with all that period’s jazzy tropes, including back projection, split-screen phone conversations, doubletakes and incidental music, the result is as effervescent as a multi-coloured Alka-Seltzer. The various to-ings and fro-ings of the characters, who couple and uncouple, lie and fabricate (but never actually fornicate), are conducted with bravura energy.

Zellweger changes costume in virtually every scene and maintains a firm grasp
on her character as she segues from ingenue to power girl. McGregor struggles with his accent but invests Block with wolfish wit and swagger as he seduces his way through a flight of air hostesses before getting to grips with Novak. Move over, Austin Powers. There’s a new retro comedy in town.

Down With Love
Cert: 12A

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