I absolutely adored Celine Song’s directorial debut two years ago with “Past Lives”, an emotionally arresting and visually arresting love triangle that thrives on sensitivity and simplicity while playing on the Korean concept of InYeon to create both a nuanced exploration of lost love and longing for something different and a wistful, mature poem on the universality of relationships and possibilities.
Celine’s sophomore outing “Materialists” is somehow both admirably introspective and thematically muddled at once.
A former matchmaker herself back when she was a struggling New York playwright, Celine Song’s directorial hand is still one of surgical elegance that is as unsparing as it is compassionate. Unobtrusive but keen, she constructs every scene like a memory you’re not sure belongs to you, at once vivid and fogged with the residue of wishful thinking.
Grimy, sleek, messy, lavish and nearly everything in between, the production design is almost pivotal in its refusal to choose a side, thriving on this restless ping-pong between the aspirational and the aggressively lived-in while feeling too familiar or too foreign; performatively unmoored window dressing, there are flickers of warmth to it but they’re never allowed to fully soften the environments of the city in Anthony Gasparro hands. And it’s no wonder why the atmosphere here doesn’t make me miss home, as there’s this eternal restlessness perturbing everywhere in its more quieter moments. The camera—often stationary, patient, and dolorous—becomes an extension of this inherited ambivalence, framing each encounter as if trying to locate, in the interstitial spaces of dialogue and gesture, what exactly has been lost in the act of modern self-fashioning and while the editing doesn’t completely play along, it revels in its more simplistic cuts and transitions.
Pacing nearly lost me near the end of the second act but quickly rebounded, costumes are subtly unsubtle as they aptly reflect the characters' shifting sense of self, desires and their place in the world, sound design captures an intimate, insular soundscape that sonically blurs out the rest of the world not adjacent to our leads and while I’ll forever miss the haunting, evocative work of Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen from Past Lives, Daniel Pemberton’s score is no slouch either with the pop adjacent soundtrack.
Maybe this is me reading too much into this but I swear almost every character in “Materialists” exists with a kind of fashionable dysfunctionality that all the performances lean all the way into: Dakota Johnson’s warm stillness, Chris Evans corrosive charm and Pedro Pascal’s swaggering smoothness, among many others, all make for precision-calibrated portraits of someone who has chosen, either consciously or otherwise, to be a little bit broken. No one character here is fully fleshed out; they’re not allowed the luxury of a full psychology; everyone is a little vaporous, a little incomplete by design.
And the sparse, light-footed dialogue from previously is replaced with a sharp, brittleness.
While Song’s first story was one based on personal inspiration that thrived on the emotionally complex yearnings of the unknown, this one feels like an emulation of Crossing Delancey, which also just so happened to be following a woman deciding between two men, symbolizing the conflict between and juxtaposing against the superficial trappings of economic status and societal expectations…..and I don’t mean that in a negative way. This is a layered peek-through-the-looking-glass at the modern dating scene and shifting romantic dynamics in an age of class-conscious courtship, one that does avoid the stereotypes of womanhood portrayed in Sex and the City but also one that doesn’t entirely follow through on that maturity despite opening itself up to narrative dead ends that would’ve benefited the narrative it was trying to say. It’s still a heavily mature resisting of fairy tale trajectory in favor of a narrative that is violently aware of its own artifice.
Regardless of how the topic has been stretched and evaluated for the past couple centuries, it can be agreed that love has always been a complicated prospect to grasp; a silent eruption, a primal desire disguised as a cerebral pursuit or intellectual endeavor. If Past Lives explores love through an idealistic perspective, Materialists stays true to its title by examining and deconstructing love through a materialist viewpoint, focusing on tangible desires and practicalities and in a genre often obsessed with grand gestures, its nice to see a film like this call out and methodically deconstruct those gestures and recursive algorithms of attraction.
We all walk around with a mental checklist of expectations and beliefs to sort of compartmentalize into bargaining chips both enabled and sabotaged by the very freedoms that supposedly outline our happiness. Some of us are really shallow on what we think we want out of the love we receive or what we share, that we’re willing to sacrifice our own internal happiness to negotiate for the material things we think we want, essentially treating love as a transaction where, despite the glitzy appeal, neither side really wins. I really like how Song’s script, for all its surface breeziness, is pitiless in its honesty on cutting to the nature of modern affection, showing how the hunger for connection itself in the modern day has become this commodity shopping craze we sometimes have to exchange value for to remember what we had or feel some kind of validation. It dramatizes both the emptiness of this arrangement and the potential ugliness it can awaken in this….this arms race for self-preservation and presentation.
Any relationship consummated as a kind of business deal is a shallow one that’s unlikely to lead to real, lasting happiness. Love, stripped of transcendence, is just another high-stakes hustle masked in a city, in a world where everyone hustles. You can’t demand more from these characters because the system doesn’t reward anything more; even their happiness (or failure) feels outsourced, performative, subject to peer review.
With all that being said…..the film’s narrative elasticity feels stretched thin by only a tiny bit. It may honor the complexities of its subject by refusing to collapse its contradictions into easy answers but it doesn’t break from the mold and ends exactly how one might expect it to. While I can overlook that, the trajectory of how we get to that inevitable conclusion puts a monkey wrench in my enjoyment of an otherwise nuanced portrayal of modern love.
Not to mention, that can go so far if the characters aren’t picking up the slack. Say what you will about Past Lives but the central three characters were fleshed out enough to stand on their own and had their issues and beliefs carefully triangulated into and around believable tension without it ever turning sappy; the script didn’t need to cloy around the characters' backstories or converse in exposition vomit to earn their visceral beats. Here, they all feel strictly like archetypes; I know this was most likely a conscious choice Celine Song made to emphasize her thesis but that very lack of anchoring comes at the expense of those fully invested emotional stakes.
Even in its missteps, this film isn't afraid to challenge the conventional narratives of romance and love, offering an insightful critique of the games we play with our own hearts in search of validation and 'happiness.'
