Materialists
Starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal
M
4.5/5
The second film from Past Lives writer-director Celine Song, Materialists is a tightly-written delight of enthralling dialogue and low-impact but deeply moving drama.
Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a professional matchmaker in New York, begins a relationship with wealthy financier Harry (Pedro Pascal), but also reconnects with her ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans).
Johnson plays Lucy as a victim of her own success: an outwardly classy, discerning woman whose love life is stifled by her own matchmaking instincts.
The dialogue is intricate and literary but still feels natural (once again highlighting Song’s playwright roots), and has a clever subversive layer of taking desirability and market value, terms so often used misogynistically against women, and turning them on men through Lucy’s agency.
The plot has several well-seeded details that return in satisfying ways, and the major threads of Lucy’s glamorous but passionless relationship with Harry, her deeper bond with John and a
match turned abusive weave together to show how simple, undefinable love is more important than partners ticking boxes on a clinical list of criteria.
The naturalistic performances, scant use of non-diegetic music (music played outside of the film’s world) and the beautiful cinematography, which captures the style and grunge of New York,
come together to make an immersive, cozy but profound experience.
Materialists is like the inverse of the 2017 New Zealand comedy The Breaker-Upperers, in which the protagonists specialise in ending relationships instead of starting them, and could easily
be taken as a prelude to Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2015 sci-fi satire The Lobster, which takes compatible partnerships to a dystopian extreme.
An outstanding romantic drama from a filmmaker who excels at conveying the joyful messiness of human existence, Materialists is playing in most Victorian cinemas.
