Written by Dilan Fernando

Celine Song’s sophomore film Materialists opens with a shot of flowers in a field, a caveman delicately picks a bouquet later bringing it home to his cavewoman girlfriend. Song’s focus on the flowers and the handmade knives in the caveman’s bag emphasize the film’s premise of valuables being desired more than people of value. So is the act of giving and receiving gifts archaic or is it the meaning within the sentiment that’s outdated? Whichever it is, Song focuses on how such sentiments can make people so jaded and austere in their dating values that they prefer to hunt without gathering any knowledge. Viewing them as meaningless gestures that are marked by their monetary worth, Song vacuums all the hope for love and connections possible before the film gets going.

Centering around the personal life and career of Lucy (Dakota Johnson) a professional matchmaker working for a moderately successful New York based matchmaking company named Adore. Walking to a coffee shop to meet with one of her clients, she’s eyed by a middle aged man in a suit walking by. Turning around she asks, “Are you single?”, extending her business card, with that, she’s got another fish on the line. Lucy’s charming presence makes her seem like she’s genuinely hopeful about uniting couples, leading them to the altar. However, what the couples don’t realize because they are so self-absorbed is that Lucy has a shotgun to their backs. Whether a couple is married or not it doesn’t matter to Lucy, as she can make opportunities out of anything. If a couple gets married there’s always a singles table at the reception. If a couple splits up there are two more opportunities to look for life partners. Loneliness, an affliction that only Lucy has the cure to; makes her more of a swindler than a professional. Lucy mentions to a character later on in the film that dropping out of college was what made her embark on a career in matchmaking. When asked about her salary she confidently responds, “$80,000 a year before taxes.”, with a resilient tone that says, if she can make it anyone can.

Lucy’s way of matchmaking is analytical, she doesn’t seek to fulfill the needs of those clients that work for her, instead working to redirect them to needs they didn’t even have until she mentioned it. This cold business approach highlights the strengths of Dakota Johnson’s acting ability, her delivery of lines in these icy moments feels like one’s being bludgeoned with a blunt instrument. Hoping to distance herself from anyone by having requisites that can never be fulfilled which is Lucy’s defense mechanism. Had Song kept focus on Lucy’s emotional frigidity, Lucy could’ve been as interestingly complex a character as Faye Dunaway’s career-driven cutthroat, Diana Christensen in Network (1976) who sees love and affection as avoidable obstacles. What remains is a clichéd formula that’s been the basis for many made-for-television soap operas and romantic comedies – the very genre Song had hoped to satirize by showing its predictability and unoriginality.

Celine Song swings and misses with *Materialists*: a follow-up romantic experiment after the similar-yet-brilliant *Past Lives*. Here, Song doesn’t seem sure of what she is hoping to achieve.

After the success of one of her matches results in marriage she’s invited to the wedding and is treated as though she coined the concept of marriage. Assisting the bride with some last minute jitters, Lucy returns to the reception. What’s the point in feigning sympathy when Lucy’s already cut her cheque? Do empty platitudes build good word of mouth? Maybe that’s what Lucy ponders as she sits solely at the singles table waiting for the other guests to fill it. One of the people in the wedding party, the groom’s brother Harry (Pedro Pascal) switches seats with some other guest who was to sit next to Lucy, seeing her as a prime candidate to be his wife. When Lucy’s body language shows some hesitancy to continue with the charade of engaging with Harry in small talk and light flirting, her forwardness tells him she’s uninterested for now. However, Harry is one of those guys that likes a challenge and suggests every one of his assets hoping to sweeten the deal.

Before this passing fancy can blossom into anything a waiter carrying a tray of drinks walks by. Harry asks Lucy what she prefers to drink, “A beer and coke.”, she says, the waiter returns with her order. Well, it happens that she and the waiter, John (Chris Evans) were once an item; as Harry watches their reunion with a look of awkward hope. Lucy, who begins the film as a cold recipient of romance instantly forgoes that ideology when she sees John. Song’s hope of creating a love triangle is thrown out when more focus is given to the emotional connection between Lucy and John which had been established long before they met again at the wedding reception.

A love triangle should be balanced between those involved like Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) or Y tu mamá también (2001), not favouring one relationship over the other, especially so early in a film. There’s a scene where John and Lucy meet at a bar for a drink after John invites her to the premiere of an off-broadway play around the time she begins dating Harry. During a moment in the night when John and Lucy sit reminiscing at the bar, John asks Lucy if she misses her dream of acting. Lucy replies, “No.” The subtext here poses the question that if Lucy gave up on her dream career so easily wouldn’t she do the same with her dream guy if things get tough?

It’s here where the film essentially ends as the handling of this scene gives way to the trajectory of the plot leading to its climax. The one flaw that makes the film flounder from the very beginning is that Lucy and many of her coworkers working for the matchmaking company are single. If they were married, engaged, or in a relationship, wouldn’t it give them more credibility as professional matchmakers, being living proof their product works rather than showing they are active users of it. Song, who's been married to screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes – Challengers (2024) and Queer (2024), begins the film by gifting a knife and watches from afar alongside her husband as the characters and audience clumsily fend for themselves, enduring the tribulations of modern dating on the battlefield of love. Why have a movie to present that feeling when you could walk outside to feel it first-hand?

Dilan Fernando graduated with a degree in Communications from Brock University. ”Written sentiments are more poetic than spoken word. Film will always preserve more than digital could ever. Only after a great film experience can one begin to see all that life has to offer.“