Film
Celine Song’s follow-up to Past Lives explores the capitalist trappings of modern romance, without subverting them. By Luke Goodsell.
Love is ephemeral in Celine Song’s Materialists
It’s been 40 years since Madonna released her career-defining smash “Material Girl”, a winking, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes-inspired ode to love in the time of mergers and acquisitions. If anything, the scene has become even more ruthless. Romance is gamified on algorithmically augmented apps. Finding a partner, or even a date for the evening, is a matter of building a stock portfolio: age, height, income, future earning potential. As the Queen of Pop cautioned her suitors, all those years ago: “If they can’t raise my interest / then I have to let them be.”
Materialists, the new film from Celine Song – the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind 2023’s buzzy arthouse hit Past Lives – picks up where La Ciccone left off. The opening scene, which unfolds in a prehistoric diorama, imagines the original sin of love as property investment, with a caveman sliding a flower ring onto his partner’s finger. With a gentle nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the action leaps thousands of years ahead to modern-day New York, where we meet Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a 30-something Manhattanite in the employ of an elite matchmaking agency.
In her plain white blouse and little black skirt, Lucy is chic enough to pass in the high-society enclaves that are her business, and Johnson – a fizzy, charismatic star – exudes the irresistible warmth and confidence that puts her clientele at ease. It’s an old-fashioned dating service, ostensibly tailored to singles who wouldn’t be caught dead swiping right: mediocre middle-aged men with million-dollar salaries looking for women half their age and twice as attractive; successful career women struggling against the perception that they’re washed up at 40.
“He doesn’t feel like the chemistry is there for him, at this time,” Lucy tells one client, sounding more like an HR manager than a confidante, or as if Patrick Bateman had entered the matchmaking business. “You’re looking for a nursing home partner and a grave buddy,” Lucy advises another, and she consoles a distraught newlywed that “marriage is a business deal – you can always walk away if the deal isn’t good”.
It’s a world in which men have operations to extend their legs in the pursuit of extra height. As Lucy’s co-worker Daisy, played by Dasha Nekrasova, notes, “Six inches can double a man’s value in the market.”
None of this romance-as-capitalism (and vice versa) is exactly new, but it does cover some vintage rom-com terrain. Lucy is the genre’s classic single girl, a born matchmaker who can’t get her own shit together. Like the brash bridge-and-tunnel blow-in played by Johnson’s mother, Melanie Griffith, in the 1988 yuppie hit Working Girl, Lucy is a makeover waiting to happen – only in reverse.
Right on cue , as Lucy celebrates the nuptials of the latest deal she’s brokered, in swoops Harry (Pedro Pascal), an ultra-rich finance charmer who seems to have stepped out of an advertisement for Rolex. He’s graced with the kind of subtle confidence that only obscene amounts of money can buy. Harry is the Katharine Hepburn to Lucy’s Cary Grant: the disruptive force that cuts to the essence of her dilemma.
When he asks what it’s like being a matchmaker, she fires back, immediately dropping her guard: “It’s like working at an insurance company or the morgue.” The game is on.
Harry is, in industry speak, a “unicorn”. Lucy can’t understand why a guy with a $12 million Tribeca penthouse would be interested in a girl who takes home $80,000 before taxes. And at the same time he appears, she re-encounters her ex, John (Chris Evans) – an actor living hand-to-mouth as an event catering waiter. They separated years ago, when she grew tired of him being broke. He never fell out of love with her, just out of her price range. It’s soon apparent that she still has feelings for him, too, however messy they might be.
In the marketing approach typical of its boutique distributor, A24, Materialists arrives with a tastefully curated Letterboxd list of Song’s influences for the film, which includes everything from Jane Austen and Merchant Ivory to Mike Leigh and James L. Brooks. One that was curiously missing was the work of Whit Stillman, whose preppy portrayal of Manhattan – in such singular films as his 1990 debut, Metropolitan, about a circle of young socialites – is reflected in Song’s moneyed surfaces and social jousting.
For better and sometimes worse, and for all its stated influences, this is every bit a Celine Song movie, however. Unlike Brooks or James Ivory, the writer-director isn’t ultimately committed to finding the humanity in characters who don’t fit her conception of good people – of empathising with rich jerks in ways that might upend an audience’s expectations. Her film might toy with the thrill of a woman beating the world of privilege at its own game, but Song isn’t walking that tonal highwire. Instead she reprises the familiar, slightly melancholic tone she summoned so well in Past Lives.
If it all feels like a failure of conceptual nerve, then that’s not to say that Song hasn’t made a movie entirely on her own terms. Like its predecessor, Materialists is personal – Song worked as a Manhattan matchmaker for a spell in her 20s. The film’s execution is in keeping with her fondness, as a former playwright, for long takes, considered dialogue, and performances that evolve organically within the scene.
Even so, Song’s screenplay – especially in the film’s more wistful, sometimes maudlin back half – leans into the kind of platitudes that no amount of lingering delivery can quite hide. Her commitment to “real” love, whatever that may be, isn’t any more convincing than the expedient manoeuvres of the rich people she satirises.
Whichever way you slice it, Materialists doesn’t make a great case for romance, which may be entirely by design. In Song’s cinema, love feels ephemeral, at times closer to friendship, and forever at risk of being carried away on the slightest breeze.
Materialists is screening in cinemas nationally.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 28, 2025 as "Love in a time of plethora".
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