Delusions of Romance
Celine Song goes back to the romantic well in her follow-up to ‘Past LIves’. Same SAme. But different.
materialists
Director: Celine Song • Writer: Celine Song
Starring: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal
USA • 1hr 56mins
Opens Hong Kong August 21 • IIB
Grade: C+
Taken from one angle, playwright-director Celine Song’s Materialists is the perfect follow-up to her somnolent yet irritating Past Lives, which left the interesting story on the cutting room floor (the one about a Korean woman trying to navigate marriage to a white guy) in favour of some bullshit pseudo-artistic navel-gazing about regrets, second chances and the one that got away. Past Lives was a well made film, and it’s one that really, truly spoke to people who dig that kind of thing, but for just as many others it traded in bullshit tropes and trite, hoary imagery (Nora’s an artist at a retreat so of course she has an off the shoulder artisanal hand-knit sweater she wears while cradling her mug of herbal tea) and wish fulfilment of the privileged kind. Materialists is a story that runs adjacent to that, one about a professional matchmaker who’s forced to reconcile her job and what she thinks are her beliefs with, sigh, true love. Beginning with some random cavepersons courting each other – wrestling with love and romance is as old as time, you see – the film wallows in tradition and is aggressively heteronormative. That’s not an issue in itself, clearly Song is speaking from a place she knows, but something she clearly doesn’t know is how grim the infrastructure of modern dating truly is, especially for women. Materialists a misfire, even if it is an awkwardly earnest one.
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First things first, Materialists is not funny, despite having all the trappings of a rom-com on the surface and wanting desperately to appear like it’s subverting the genre’s conventions. It’s got a Manhattan setting, aspirational jobs, stupid wardrobes and Midtown brownstone flats – even though the shockingly miscast Dakota Johnson’s Lucy doesn’t have a passport (!), or a life outside her gig as a professional matchmaker. Still, this is straight up drama. After celebrating her ninth match ending in nuptials – which almost don’t happen until she swoops in with a last-minute pep talk about the bride’s value (this is a recurring theme) – Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal, also miscast) at the reception. They chat and she pitches him as an ideal client, and then Lucy runs into her old boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a classic New Yorker: the actor working as a waiter.
Needless to say she starts dating Harry but occasionally talking with John. In between we see Lucy trying to find her clients spouses, and firmly treating emotional connections – love – as commercial transactions. She sees people as commodities, often dropping words like value and “the math”. We meet some of her clients as they brutally itemise their gamebreakers: maximum BMIs, age ceilings, income floors, “no fatties”. Lucy has a particular soft spot for Sophie (Zoë Winters), a “fine” woman with a “fine” job who’s had no luck with a match. She has no USP.
Song’s raison d’être here is to break down the choice between love or money that so many of us allegedly must make (even if no trade in goats is involved) by positioning Harry as the mathematically sound, safe choice and John as the unstable, inspiring one that leads straight to the poorhouse. In Song’s world, it’s one or the other; there’s no such thing as safe and inspiring. Lucy is constantly evaluating the logic of her connection with Harry and telling him she’s a bad choice for him (oh, the irony), to the point where Materialists resorts to a random sexual assault subplot and a left field action – sorry “action” – finale in order for Lucy to see the error of her calculating ways. Hey, I’m a Johnson fan, but her strength is her obvious disdain for the kind of bullshit that’s piled high here and which she tamps down. She’s just makes a short-sighted fool. Pascal doesn’t work either considering Harry is supposed to be the bland, mainstream cis het option – something Pascal is making a career of not being. Adding insult to injury Song’s muddled message is wrapped in some gawdawful, self-conscious dialogue (“I’m the guy who lost you twice” and shit like that) that substitutes face-palming cliché for insight into contemporary romance. It’s insufferable.