Celine Song blew us away with Past Lives. Is Materialists a perfect match?
Materialists
★★★★
M, 117 minutes
Celine Song burst onto the film world in 2023 with her debut, Past Lives, an achingly beautiful tale about connections missed (in this life, if not in past or future ones). Her follow-up, Materialists, is similarly obsessed with romantic matches made and not made, but this time the focus is mathematical rather than metaphysical.
Lucy (Dakota Johnson) works as a matchmaker in New York City. She's the kind of person who will stop a likely candidate in the street, hand over her business card, and tell them to call if they're interested in meeting one of the fine specimens on the books of her firm, Adore.
Her gig is a throwback to the DBA years (dating before apps), but the underpinning logic of it is no less data driven: it's a numbers game, she tells people.
At a wedding (the ninth she has orchestrated, which makes her a superstar in her firm), Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal). The secret to a successful match, she tells him, is similar background, similar interests, a match on desired height and income and physical compatibility. It's all about the maths.
What about you, he asks her, what are you looking for? 'The next person I date will be the person I marry,' she says. 'He will be obscenely rich.'
Harry ticks the boxes, as Lucy would say. Her ex-boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), does not. He turns up at the wedding, too, waiting tables to make ends meet while waiting for the big acting break that's destined never to come. He's 37, but still sharing the crappy, cramped apartment he was in when they dated in their 20s. Money is why they broke up, or rather her exhaustion at the lack of it, his exhaustion at her exhaustion. Nothing much has changed.
In all of this, it's not hard to detect distinct echoes of Jane Austen. Modern Manhattan is not so different to middle England in the early 19th century. It is still a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife – so long as she has a BMI of no more than 20, is aged between 24 and 27, and isn't going to expect him to settle down too soon.
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