Celine Song, writer-director of the thoughtful, poignant, highly praised, Best Picture–nominated drama Past Lives (2023), has come out with her second film, a romantic comedy called Materialists. Song’s trying to be thoughtful about that too — the way the silly, swoony genre as a whole works, as well as the way the real-life perils of contemporary romance play out. But how to get the swoony and the cruelly crass together in one film?
It can be done, as Song knows when she repeatedly cites Jane Austen in interviews. Austen’s novels continue to inspire successful film adaptations due to her wizardry in mining believable romantic matches out of the unpromising materials of men and women trapped in confining social roles dictated by harsh factors such as age, appearance, income, and class status. Song is consciously following in the firm footsteps of Austen, who especially foregrounded the role money plays in love and marriage, most famously in the ironic opening line of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
And Song has done her research when it comes to the cold calculations involved in matchmaking companies such as the one at the center of Materialists. It seems Song worked as a matchmaker in the 2010s and “learned more about people in those six months than at any other time in my life.”
Out of that bruising experience, she created the narrative following the love life of Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a leading rep at the New York City–based matchmaking company Adore. Lucy is a smooth cynic when it comes to “doing the math” — rating prospective “matches” in hard-edged calculations of age, height, weight, fitness, profession, educational level, conventional notions of physical attractiveness, and above all, income.
The greedy, calculating demands of Lucy’s clients are driven by their elaborate fantasies of what they…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
