AFTER the grime and grind of Young Adam, Ewan McGregor is bedding women once more in Down With Love.

This time the grubby fingernails and dead-fish eyes have made way for a sparkle on his teeth, a twinkle in the iris, and black dye in his groomed hair, but Peyton Reed's fluffy and fluffed homage to swish 1960s romantic comedies is all empty style.

Marilyn Monroe and Doris Day, Cary Grant and Rock Hudson were a pleasure to watch in battle-of the-sexes encounters: glamorous, amusing, agreeable company. Down With Love, however, is an endurance test for viewer and stars alike, with McGregor and Renee Zellweger being about as convincing as a politician's promise. The comedy is coarse, its timing off-course, where it needs to be slick and sharp and droll.

Zellweger is author Barbara Novak, as pink and blonde and ambitious as Reese Witherspoon's lawyer in Legally Blonde, and her new pink-sleeved book, Down With Love, is all the rage with its advice for women to stick to chocolate and casual sex rather than fall in love in the new age of the Pill.

Celebrity investigative journalist and dastardly Casanova about town Catcher Block (McGregor) vows to pursue her, woo her and expose her as a feminist fraud, and so begins a game of titillating bluff and counter bluff, seduction and disguise.

Yet why has Reed made this meticulous but pointless facsimile? Todd Haynes was equally attentive to period detail in his bleak Fifties drama Far From Heaven earlier this year, but that movie had heart and a desolate soul. Down With Love has smart New York fashions, retro decor, split screens, 'Scope camerawork and a perkily persistent jazz score, but when put together they make the screen as busy, noisy and tiresome.

McGregor's not-so cool cat comes on like a cross between his Moulin Rouge writer and Austin Powers; Zellweger never decides whether novelist Novak should be as knowing as Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake's smug script or whether she just struck lucky.

Down With Love isn't camp or clever, and its humour is joylessly bouncy. Spend a night in with a Doris Day movie instead.

Updated: 09:41 Friday, October 03, 2003