Materialists (dir. Celine Song)

By: Adam Freed

Celine Song has been blessed by a beautiful intuition when it comes to providing people with what they need to experience, rather than what it is that they think they want. Of course romance is easier to swallow when it comes adorned with a cleanly resolved and happy ending, but life isn’t that easy.  There is no shortage of directors who make romcoms and romantic films, but almost none that manage to offer contemplative stories that linger in the mind far longer than they exist on the screen.  This is the business of budding auteur Celine Song.  Her penchant for romantic insight began with Song’s deeply intuitive and emotionally evocative look at romantic longing in the 2023 delicate earthquake of a film Past Lives.  Cemented by her ability to cut directly to the core of the insidious nature of superficiality, through her new film Materialists, the Korean director serves the moviegoing public with a heaping helping of reality.  As the director’s star has risen, so has the budget with which she is able to work, leading to the casting of one of Hollywood’s hottest stars in Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian, The Last of Us) in addition to Chris Evans (Captain America: The First Avenger) and a crafty deployed Dakota Johnson (Daddio, The Peanut Butter Falcon), makes Materialists look like a swanky red carpet romance, but its intentions are far loftier and its execution far better than its marketing campaign could possibly portray.

Song playfully accompanies her audience into a world of couture and caviar, one in which material possession feels paramount to one’s ability to invest in a serious partner. This is certainly the case for central character Lucy (Johnson), a high-end matchmaker who deals with a pool of mostly shallow and affluent clients.  Given the Manhattan backdrop of the film, it is easy to see the surface level allure of Lucy’s position and status. Materialists is abundantly patient in its willingness to lure audiences down the path of primitive desire, and equally cunning in its presentation of the necessary upheaval to those initial emotions.  It is almost impossible to not feel swept up in the promise of the wealth that Harry (Pascal) has to offer, an elegant affluence that audiences are permitted to luxuriate in for the purpose of imbibing in its intoxicating power.  For Lucy, a college dropout from humble means, dating someone like Harry checks just about every box she could ever ask for.  But that is someone else’s film, a Cinderella story with far less of a point to make, or a purpose to serve.  Materialists is not a rags to riches story, it is also not a pursuit of possession or numeric accumulation.  Song’s dynamite romantic drama targets something far more important, a reality check that cannot be reduced to words, it is one that must be experienced. 

Not every frame of Materialists is as wire tight as Past Lives (2023), which leaves the film feeling shaggy in rare moments.  Most specifically, its opening scene serves a clear purpose, but feels a little too direct in its introduction of the film’s thematic angle.  Tonally, Materialists is far more confident in its humor than Song’s previous work.  The film is very funny, but never in a winking way.  Humor is deployed to satisfy its need to illuminate the hypocrisy and self indulgent manner in which some people approach the world of dating.  Celine Song has a gift for presenting and litigating three aspects of time, the past, the present and the future. Lucy’s past is a retrospective glance at her former five year relationship with John (Evans), a partnership that fell victim to financial strain and an immature reliance on the perception of security. Lucy’s version of the present is a hyper focus on her career, one in which she begins the film by celebrating the ninth wedding of her matchmaking clients.  In a career focused entirely on finding love for others, there cannot possibly be room for Lucy to find love herself.  What lies ahead for Lucy, and for audiences, are a multitude of roads in need of exploration, many of which are encouraged by primal desire.  Regardless of the path that Lucy chooses, her evolution, and the introspection that it requires to process is worthy of rumination.

Target Score 8.5/10 - Seductive and contemplative, Materialists is not what most broad audiences are going to expect it to be. Be this as it may, as is usually the case with her work, Celine Song’s film is exactly what it needs it to be.