Briefly Reviewed – Celine Song’s ‘Materialists’

Celine Song seems to have wanted to move away from Past Lives. Her new film is more mainstream and (thankfully) more messy, both in terms of structure and in terms of what it talks about. I wasn’t as wowed by Past Lives the way many of my friends were. I found it too neat, too constructed, too perfect. Every bit of silence hung in the air just so. I liked the film, but I think I liked Materialists more. On the surface, it is a love triangle where a girl has a rich man on one arm and a struggling-to-make-ends-meet man on the other. But scratch this surface, and this could also be a tug of war between art and commerce: one of the suitors is in finance, the other is a theatre actor. The words “valuable” and “worthless” are used to describe the effects of love, and marriage is described as a “business”. Yeah, there is a reason this story is called what it’s called.

There are many things that did not click for me: like the “awww” ending, or the flashback to cavemen. I don’t think close-up “cute” is Celine Song’s thing. But when she gazes at her characters from a distance, she brings an amazing clarity and curiosity – she’s something of a social scientist who’s trying to figure out Friendship Day and Valentine’s Day and these other “rituals” we hold on to in order to celebrate the people around us because we don’t want to die alone. But what about the inner rituals, the ones only we know about, like how we change our bodies because we don’t like how we look and we know that others are going to judge us for these “deficiencies”? I adore rom-coms, but Materialists is more than that. Its construct resembles that of a rom-com but it also comes with a ton of very felt pain. Instead of writing a screenplay around characters, the film makes us feel that these characters are drifting along, writing their own screenplay. They are messy, so is the film, which has brilliant high points along with moments that made me go… “really?” I was riveted.