Down with Love opens with the big CinemaScope logo that once announced 20th Century Fox mass-market entertainments. The titles show animated letters bouncing each other off the screen, and the music is chirpy. The movie s opening scenes confirm these clues: This is a movie set in 1962, and filmed in the style of those Doris Day-Rock Hudson classics about the battle of the sexes. That it adds an unexpected twist is part of the fun.
Maybe filmmakers believe that movies lost something when they added irony. Far from Heaven was in the style of a 1957 Universal melodrama, and now this wide screen comedy, with bright colors and enormous sets filled with postwar modern furniture, wants to remember a time before the sexual revolution.