Down With Love - Definition

Down With Love is a 2003 film directed by Peyton Reed and written by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake. It stars Ewan McGregor, Renée Zellweger, David Hyde Pierce and Sarah Paulson. The movie is an affectionate pastiche of the films made by Rock Hudson and Doris Day in the late 1950s and early 1960s, most notably Pillow Talk (1959) and Lover Come Back (1961).

The sets, costumes, cinematography, editing, score and special effects are carefully designed to give the impression that the movie was actually shot in 1962, even to the extent of digitally recreating the New York skyline and developing a greenscreen technique simulating 1960s rear projection. While the plot reflects the attitudes and behaviour of the pre-sexual revolution early sixties, the film has a subtext informed by more modern, post-feminist ideas and attitudes, while the script is a mix of early 21st Century language combined with the type of light-hearted banter that dominated films of the early 1960s.

Synopsis

Catcher Block (McGregor) is a successful playboy journalist, constantly frustrating his neurotic boss (Pierce - the Tony Randall part). He accepts an assignment to interview author Barbara Novak (Zellweger) whose new book 'Down With Love' instructs women to have sex the way a man does - eschewing love. Catcher resolves to prove that Barbara is really 'just like all the other girls' and invents an alter ego, 'Zip Martin', to seduce her. Barbara, however, has a secret of her own.

Trivia

• The musical number seen during the closing credits (and in its entirety on the DVD release) was a last-minute addition to the film. Ewen McGregor suggested that since he and Renée Zellweger had recently appeared in two very popular musical films (Moulin Rouge! and Chicago respectively), it only made sense for the two of them to do a song together.

External links

• Official site (http://www.down-with-love.com/)
• Down With Love (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0309530/) at the Internet Movie Database