Materialists (2025)
Directed by Celine Song
A young, ambitious New York City matchmaker finds herself torn between the perfect match and her imperfect ex.
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In her follow-up to her Oscar nominated debut "Past Lives," writer/director Celine Song once again features a woman caught between two men, but this time she's viewing them through an entirely different lens, one she experienced herself during six months as a professional matchmaker in New York City.
Past Lives (2023; Kanopy, Netflix, Paramount+, YouTube Primetime, rentable): In Song’s debut, an immigrant (Greta Lee) reconnects with an old flame from South Korea and wonders what could have been.
Similarly to how her previous film focused on what might have been between two childhood sweethearts, Materialists walks a similar route examining the relationship between a pragmatist and a dreamer.
But as with Past Lives, audiences will have a lot to think about in the days after they see it.
Si Past Lives hablaba de conexiones invisibles que sobreviven al tiempo y la distancia, aquí el foco está en lo tangible: el sueldo, el estatus, el valor percibido.
In her Oscar-nominated debut, 2023’s transcendent Past Lives, an émigré reconnects with her Korean childhood sweetheart, weighing their what-might-have-been against the tangible present tense she shares with her American husband. Materialists tenders another sharp contrast – between financial security with the attentive, strikingly confident Harry, or something more engine-revving with John, a broke 37-year-old grump still living with roommates.
A real Broadcast News influence, for example, would have led Lucy to end up with neither John nor Harry, but leaving in the back of a taxi cab.
One wishes she’d leaned more Nora Ephron than Broadcast News.
Yet, on another occasion, she relates how some men spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a painful surgery to increase their height by up to six inches, a procedure I had only previously heard of in Andrew Niccol’s 1997 dystopian sci-fi movie Gattaca (a quick trip to Mar-A-Lago suggests that the compulsion for such dysmorphic butchery is more symptomatic of female rather than male pathology).
Hint: if you saw “Gattaca” (1997), you can guess, and Song is brilliant for coming up with a rare, not commonly known, factoid.
And Lucy’s problem is the eternal Pretty in Pink conundrum; does being a penniless loser rule a guy out?
I noticed how Lucy gets along well with her boss, Violet (Marin Ireland), at the matchmaking agency, similar to how Andie connected with Iona at the record shop in… nah.
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Except for the Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell romcom, Anyone But You, and the Jennifer Lawrence star vehicle, No Hard Feelings, the 2020s have been a relatively dire decade for theatrically released romcoms.
Yet the rom-com has been making a comeback as of late, thanks in large part to box office successes like "Anyone But You" as well as genre mashups like this year's "Heart Eyes."
Anyone But You and Babygirl were mere starters, just hearty enough to whet one’s appetite without spoiling dinner.
Sounds trite, but think of a story cut in the same cloth as recent offerings like Joachim Trier’s Norwegian quarter-life crisis drama The Worst Person in the World…
Perhaps taking a cue from Joachim Trier's inspired use of Harry Nilsson on the soundtrack of another not-quite-rom-com, The Worst Person in the World, Song plays out those honeymoon-phase scenes to “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City,” one of a handful of choice needle-drops.
Like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Celine Song’s sophomore effort opens during The Dawn of Man.
It’s an art film dressed up as The Notebook.
(I genuinely enjoy The Notebook, so don’t come at me. You know what I mean, don’t act like you don’t).
We’ve seen elements of this tale as old as time in The Notebook, Sweet Home Alabama, Made of Honor, and more.
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Will Smith stars in this earlier variation on the "single matchmaker" premise, playing a dating coach who's more adept at solving his clients' romantic problems than his own.
In this case, the backdrop is Bushwick, going off the fact that John invites them to come for a drink “around the corner” at what turns out to be Birdy’s. The same bar prominently featured in another A24 movie, A Different Man…