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Down with Love has been reviewed by most critics as a lightweight film, though many have found it appealing as a romantic comedy.

I'm not sure why it's been regarded as lightweight as the film serves up a large dose of gender politics along with the humour and the song and dance routines.

The film has two main characters, a young female author called Barbara Novak (played by Renee Zellweger) and a male magazine writer, Catcher Block (played by Ewan McGregor).

The Novak character has come to New York to sell a book called "Down with Love". The book's main idea is that women can do without love, and instead pursue casual sex "just like men".

Catcher Block is a playboy, who pursues an exotic life of international travel, whilst seducing a bevy of beautiful women.

The two main characters make it possible to date the film to 1962. This was the year that the first James Bond film, Dr No, was released. Catcher Block is easily recognisable as a take on James Bond.

Similarly, it was in 1962 that Helen Gurley Brown, the future editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, released her influential book, Sex and the Single Girl. The book caused a sensation at the time by advising single women to learn to seduce men, even married men, for the benefit of their sex lives. The idea was that single women could be satisfied by casual sex "just like men."

The situation, then, is that the film's two main characters are based fairly closely on two important cultural figures of 1962: James Bond, upholding the image of a playboy lifestyle for men, and Helen Gurley Brown, advocating something similar for women.

The question the film sets out to answer is whether men and women can really be satisfied by such lifestyles. The answer it gives is an emphatic no.

This sets the film against the radical liberalism of 1962 (and the more mainstream liberalism of today). Liberals want individuals to be free to act in any direction according to their own reason and will. It is this which, for a liberal, defines the concept of individual autonomy.

It is logical, given this starting point, that a consistent liberal will oppose a culture based on monogamy. If love leads to lifelong fidelity, then the individual is impeded in choosing who he wants to live with, or sleep with, and by the terms of liberalism, loses some of his autonomy.

The sexual revolution was all about asserting individual autonomy in matters of personal relationships. Divorce became easier, casual sex became more culturally acceptable, and a single girl lifestyle became extended for many women into their 30s.

Down with Love is anti-liberal to the extent that it suggests that the sexual revolution went too far, and that neither men nor women are likely to be fulfilled by a lifestyle based on casual sex. It reasserts a commitment to love, and by implication to fidelity, as a truer organising principle of human relationships.

However, there are at least two areas in which the gender politics of Down with Love will be less attractive to conservatives. The first is that Catcher Block is held to represent traditional masculinity, and it is only by promising to become the "New Man" that he will commit to love.

This puts things the wrong way round. The Catcher Block playboy ideal was relatively new in 1962. Ian Fleming wrote the first James Bond novel in 1952, and Hugh Hefner published the first edition of Playboy in 1953.

Hefner's Playboy was the first magazine of its kind to be published as a large-scale commercial venture. It grew to have some influence in its promotion of a playboy lifestyle for men.

Chris Colin has written that with the appearance and subsequent popularity of Playboy,

"Suddenly bachelorhood was a choice, one decorated with intelligent drinks, hi-fis and an urbane apartment that put white picket fences to shame ... America was seeing the image of the urban single male .." (Salon 28/12/99)

Playboy set itself against the traditional commitment of men to marriage and fatherhood and building a family home in the suburbs. In the early 60s therefore what the playboy Catcher Block really represents is the "New Man," the creation of Hefner and Fleming. When Catcher finally realises he wants love and commitment he is rejecting what is new and returning to something more traditional.

The second problem with the gender politics of Down with Love is that the film sneers at family life in the suburbs, and in particular at the role played by women as wives, mothers and homemakers. The film suggests that before there can be love and commitment, there must be an acceptance of the career girl ethos. The alternative for women of life in the suburbs as a wife and mother is presented as old-fashioned subservience.

You wonder how the writers of the film imagine the next generation will be raised. Helen Gurley Brown, as it happens, remained childless, claiming that this is what she wanted. She did, however, end her memoirs by penning a thirteen page letter to her fantasy child, Anna Marie. So perhaps even she experienced some of the maternal instinct that drives most women to want children.

Why should we accept that love and commitment between men and women is an important form of human connectedness, but then deny the importance of the connection between mother and child? Or the importance of a loving home to men, women and especially to children?

Down with Love only goes so far. It's willing to uphold love and commitment, but only between two people equally committed to their careers. Motherhood and the family home don't get a look in.

Nonetheless it was a mostly enjoyable film. Personally, I would have enjoyed it more if the gender politics were less laboured, but Down with Love still succeeds as an escapist romantic comedy.

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