Born in Korea, raised and educated in Canada where her parents settled when she was a child,
Celine Song now lives and works in New York as a theatre and film director. She is, in my opinion, one of the most ambitious and interesting filmmakers in North America right now. She writes her own scripts, has a lot to say and share, and does it in an interesting way. But she doesn’t succeed in everything. I really liked her debut film, ‘Past Lives’, and I was waiting with hope that ‘Materialists‘, her second film, would be as good as it or better. Unfortunately, this second film of hers was a disappointment for me. However, there is a lot to discuss and argue about it. Even in a relative (and hopefully temporary) failure, Celine Song is an interesting filmmaker.
I didn’t know that the job of ‘matchmaker’ was still in fashion. It seems so, because the film is inspired by the life experience of the screenwriter-director, who for a while worked at an agency like the ‘Adore’ the firm that Lucy, the heroine of the film ‘Materialists’, works for. Today, matchmakers are, of course, no longer the some old village women but workers in a corporate environment, who use psychological and socio-economic profiling, forms and digital methods, to find and recommend the most suitable partner to clients (women and men). A meeting follows, if all goes well a second one, and in the happiest cases it leads to a wedding. But a lot happens along the way and rarely does one reach the celebrations that mark successes. Lucy is one of those who has had the most successes in her career – 9 weddings! -, but she herself might need matchmaking. She is an elegant and beautiful woman, but she is about 35 years old and her annual income of only five figures is barely enough for her to survive in New York. A client’s wedding brings her to meet two very different men. One is super-rich and physically attractive, the other is her childhood sweetheart, just as poor and in love as she left him a decade ago. How do matchmaking technologies work in her case? One of Lucy’s clients is assaulted on a date by a man she (actually the algorithms!) had recommended as a suitable match. How will this incident affect her personal life? What decisions will she make?
In her previous film, Celine Song also dealt with a love triangle formed by a woman and two men. As there, there is no dramatic or violent conflict in ‘Materialists‘. Two men love the same woman, it has been happening for ages. Both deserve her, each in their own way. Could she be happy with either one when a decision means a permanent separation from the other? The same question, but what a difference in style and approach! The cinematic quality and psychological depth of the relationships in ‘Past Lives’ lie precisely in the characters’ silences, in what they say to each other with their eyes and not with words. ‘Materialists‘ is excessively verbose, and the text in its worst moments borders on the ridiculous. The cast doesn’t help. Dakota Johnson has all the physical qualities and too few of the acting qualities to make us care about the character and her fate, and her partners didn’t help her much. The result is paradoxical: a romantic comedy in which the most interesting part is the intellectual game of comparing the results of the matching algorithms with the realities of the relationships, an original idea that ends in a denouement like those we’ve seen in countless productions of the century of American romantic films, dialogues with unintentional humor alternating with cinematic pearls that remind us of what we expect director Celine Song to become. The prologue and epilogue, for example, as well as some of the scenes shot in New York reminded me of Woody Allen’s films from his heyday. I still think Celine Song will be a great director once she gets over this setback.