This is not another romantic comedy for Valentine’s Day, but rather a film that is largely the opposite. Anyone watching the trailer might think it’s about a young woman who meets the man of her dreams while simultaneously having to deal with her ex, who is his complete opposite.
That’s partly true, but it doesn’t reflect the spirit of the film, which explores love and dreams in terms that are much more fitting, as befits its original title, Materialistic. If anything, the film could have been called “How Much Does a Perfect Match Cost (And Can We Get a Discount)?”
Materialists
(Video: Forum Film)
This is the second film from Korean-born playwright-director Celine Song, who mesmerized audiences about two years ago with the wonderful Past Lives. As in that film, love here is certainly painful, and once again the heroine finds herself between two men — one of them a figure from her past. Even a scene in the current film, where the heroine and her ex-boyfriend watch a young couple getting married from afar and tell themselves the couple’s future story, recalls the beautiful opening of Past Lives, where two unseen characters try to guess the relationships of three people sitting across from them in a bar.
The film deals with a subject that American cinema has barely addressed: the matchmaking industry. It emphasizes the prestigious and glittering nature of the profession through the character of Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a successful matchmaker at a premium New York office that provides pampering treatment to clients, who are referred to by their first name and the first letter of their last name. The most important details are the client’s height, salary level, and age preferences for a potential partner. (Song herself worked for half a year as a matchmaker in Manhattan.) The materialistic approach to romance is expressed in the way Lucy discusses human beings like a financial analyst.
It’s no coincidence, then, that Harry (Pedro Pascal), the dream man she meets at one of her clients’ weddings, is a successful capital-market professional who lives in a $12 million designer apartment and is considered a unicorn in the dating world. To the film’s credit, Lucy is not depicted as a barefoot Cinderella, and her relationship with Harry is portrayed as two people living the Manhattan fantasy.
Love, in this world, is that unimportant thing in a culture where people are measured by their economic worth. This is the same world that Lucy’s ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans) struggles to survive in. He’s in his forties, still living in a shared apartment, working for a catering company while trying to break through as a theater actor (the play he appears in, from which we see an excerpt, is a play Song herself wrote, Tom and Eliza). “I don’t want to hate you because you’re poor,” Lucy told him on the day they broke up, instead of marking their anniversary. “But I do hate it, and it makes me hate myself.”
In such a world, Materialists provide a dramatic turn that causes even someone like Lucy to realize that the value of men and women cannot be measured like stocks on an exchange. “Forward and upward” is her motto. Lucy and her clients lack real romantic values. They are products of a neoliberal world where love and relationships are judged by market value — a cold, critical representation of material culture. In some ways, this is an almost Trumpian film in its treatment of a successful match as a deal — a term that has become central to American politics. Lucy is not a cynical character, not at all, but she inhabits a world entirely concerned with the appearance of luxury and stability. Her experience ultimately leads her to disillusionment: people are also, after all, human beings.
This is a film about people learning to value themselves beyond their material worth. In Harry’s character, for example, we see the vulnerability hidden beneath his economic power. The capitalist logic that penetrates the intimate sphere is exposed in a beautiful moment of honesty between him and Lucy. The Manhattan romantic fantasy that found its clearest expression in Sex and the City — with women competing for relationships in a stylized world — cracks open here. Materialists, at heart, is also a moral story — limited, perhaps, but still one that insists coupling is more than merchandise. Director Rachel Halfi once made a beautiful Israeli television documentary about this very issue, Matchmaking (1970).
The film indeed wonders why so many people still get married. Is love the whole story, or are we looking for the partner with the right height, salary, and status, with whom we’re willing to close a “deal”? As part of the film’s publicity campaign, the New York Stock Exchange displayed the age, height, income, and other details of single men across the city, even rating each one’s “romantic value,” complete with rises and falls. A Washington Post article covering this noted that among professional matchmakers, reactions to the film were mixed: some felt it reflects well the cynical, material side of their industry, while others complained it doesn’t give them enough credit.
It is, without doubt, intriguing to see a film that deals with a prestigious matchmaking office, although Song doesn’t fully clarify how the process works. In one scene, Lucy writes the qualities of a client in overly neat handwriting in a notebook — but beyond showing the office staff cheering, Song gives the impression that matchmaking is little more than an investment service.
At one point, Lucy even says she feels like Frankenstein, tasked with producing an ideal partner from a client’s list of demands. The film follows a familiar and fairly predictable arc in which Lucy realizes that with great power comes great responsibility — in this case, toward Sophie (Zoe Winters), one of her most selective clients. In doing so, Materialists also engage with the MeToo discourse, though sometimes in a way that makes the script feel didactic.
The bottom line: even if Song’s second feature falls short of her debut — Past Lives thrived on what remained unsaid, while here everything is spelled out — it still confirms her place as one of the most significant female voices in American cinema today.