At a particular time Celine songS Sophomore has “materialists”, Her follow -up of Her much loved “past life”, I started fixing something a little strange: the Manhattan office where our leading Lucy (Dakota Johnson) spend their days trying to arrange lasting romantic matches among the NYC elite. At first glance, the cramped and colorful office Luxe seems; It is lined with a desk and filled with eager matchmakers like Lucy, bubbling of feminine energy and joy. When a match goes really well – ie When the couple gets engaged, the ballyhooed happy end of all romance, Of course – A bar carriage is rolled out and all the young matchmakers gather around each other and cheer on their happiness and for the seemingly success of love itself. They have done it! Love wins! The fees they collect for their services do not damage either.
Still, the more time we spend in Lucy’s office, the cheaper, the more sad, the darker it looks. These desks? They look like they are going to collapse at any time, smuggled into each other as if we were at any nail salon, no room to breathe, no room to think. The bar carriage? It’s wobbly. When everything gets too much, Lucy even goes straight to the fire to get some air. It is simply not at all what it looks like at first redness.
Neither is ”Materialists. “
You would be forgiven for taking the marketing on this one (Even we did!), for while Song is second film can look on the surface, like a glossy rom-com throwback about a beautiful woman (Johnson) divided between two stylish men (Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans) when they wine and eat around a glittering manhattan, are “materialists” not A romantic comedy. It’s not even a comedy, and your reading about how romantic it is will be completely driven by how willing you are to fight with a topic like Rom-Coms rarely Broach: the boundaries of what love can do for someone.
Cynical, sad, increasingly fucked and often means song, has turned the genre inside and out to show us how shallow these stories can be. In short, imagine the decree that a movie focuses on “the love you could only find on the movies” was not a compliment, but a strict provocation. And while Song does not always succeed in this challenge, the result is convincing, dark and worth a significant discussion.
Did you really think Celine Song, already one of our best chronicles of what love actually iswould make a blank little rom-com about good, happy people? Please.
It opens, funny enough, with a vignette centered on the romantic rituals in cave people. Even they, Song claims, involved in prison activities and weighs the benefits of their paramours against the needs of the real world. And when two of her cave people do it officially, it is not so much a happy occasion as the urgent incident for several millennia of good (and bad) trade unions.
For Lucy, love is a transaction. Her customers are goods. The dating scene? It’s a market. No wonder she has been so successful in matchmaking (Johnson’s naturally cool reserve is doing wonders for the role), her work is full of running the numbers and comparing advantages and disadvantages, assessing potential romance that can be considered a business agreement. However, her different clients are not always of the same mind, and when Song shoots Johnson through increasingly terrible, impersonal and dark fun meetings (women who just want high men, men who just want younger women and worse), it’s easy to see why Lucy has become so clinical.
A flashback, inspired by encountering her ex John (Evans, working in the type of beaten register that we have not seen from him for several years) at the wedding to two of her clients, highlights further things: John and Lucy first came to the city years ago, itching for success and too bad not only to be able to afford a whole evening out in the city. Sick to death from being poor ended Lucy things with John. Years later, their love for each other is still obvious, but it is also the economic gap between them: John has not yet done it as an actor and instead takes care of the wedding, Lucy is there as a cared for guest.
Also offered at the wedding: the groom stylish brother Harry (an appealing Pascal), that type of “unicorn” Lucy would like to fix with some of her very eager female clients. But Harry is taken with Lucy, even when she is crystal clear: the main thing she is looking for in a potential husband is that he is rich. Number two is That he is rich. After all, she is a materialist. Fortunately, Harry is rich! And when we come to learn, he is also much of the same mind as Lucy about what romance is. A transaction. A deal. A merger.
When Harry and Lucy Swans about the city on all the luxurious dates, John remains at the edge of Lucy’s mind. What if love was really about Love? Not money or safety or incredibly nice penthouses (the first night they spend together on Harry’s, Lucy seems more revued up by the fucking spread than Harry’s furious kisses)? Well, Lucy surely as hell is not the person to interrogate it.
Until she is. As Lucy – analytical, cold and fully aware of her emotional deficiencies – tries to juggle a most unexpected internal war, something happens that she could not predict or prevent. For all her planning, for all her precision, for all her “Let’s take the feelings out of romance and get married!” Gusto, Lucy simply cannot control people and what they will do. That this terrible upheaval will take care of Lucy’s work is the real kicker. If she trusted professional Methods can fail so terribly, what does it say about how she leads her personal life?
Destabilization is enough to drive Lucy to new spaces, both expected and not. Who does she choose? John, who may not have a pot to piss in (and even if he did, would he have to share it with his many roommates), but sees Lucy as she is and still wants to be with her? Harry, who completely understands how love should look and move, and just uses it as a shield for his real self? Talk about bad options.
But while the song is anxious to get involved in these ideas – with the love itself, no small performance – even “materialists” cannot escape the drawing of looking things in a stylish bow full of great revelations and greater proclamations. Or is it all part of a deeper trick, a wilder swing? Love itself can remain a mystery, but how “materialists” feel if it is not. Just don’t fall for the shiny package.
Rating: B.
A24 will release “materialists” in theaters on Friday, June 13.
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