Dakota Johnson stars in Materialists as a matchmaker stuck between her wealthy client and her ex.The Canadian Press
When I tell Celine Song, the Korean-Canadian writer and director, that I haven’t stopped thinking about her new movie, Materialists, she beams in our video interview, because she views her films as dialogues: “This is exactly how I feel. This seems to haunt a lot of us. Do you feel this way? Should we take two hours in a theatre and talk about it?”
Materialists stars Dakota Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey) as Lucy, a high-end Manhattan matchmaker whose clients pursue relationships via box-ticking: Men must be tall, earn a minimum of $200,000 a year and have a full head of hair; women must be “athletic” and under 30. Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us) plays Harry, the uber-wealthy client Lucy begins dating, and Chris Evans (Captain America) is John, the actor/cater-waiter ex she can’t quite leave behind.
The question it asks is a rich one, and I use that word deliberately: Why is there such a yawning gap between that box-ticking “and the actual feeling, the ancient miracle of love?” Song wonders. “How can specs and statistics help you find this completely holy, old-as-time feeling?” Never has a romantic dramedy been so rife with money words: Characters discuss relationships in terms of the marketplace, what’s on the table, worth or worthlessness, good or bad deals; they refer to themselves and each other as commodities, chattel, merchandise, disposable versus luxury goods.
It’s Song’s second film, and her second about a love triangle – two years ago, she struck a chord around the world with her debut, Past Lives, which earned her best screenplay and best picture Oscar nominations. (I personally adored that its love triangle did not fall into the familiar rom-com trope of one choice being so obviously wrong. That triangle was equilateral.) Her work in both movies is intimate, elegant, assured; there are silences, and not a word is wasted. So I was tickled to discover that in person Song is charmingly gregarious, instantly a friend.
She and her artist parents – her father is a filmmaker, her mother an illustrator – immigrated to Markham, Ont., from South Korea when she was 12. But she’s lived in New York since 2011, when she was earning her MFA in playwriting from Columbia University. She’s 36 now, and married to the screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (Challengers, Queer), but with her tousled hair and bare face, she looks and sounds like a kid. At one point she angles her laptop so I can see out her window. “It’s the Chrysler Building!” she enthuses.
As a struggling playwright in her 20s – one of her real plays pops up as an Easter egg in Materialists – Song briefly worked as a matchmaker in NYC. I bet she was a great one. “It’s about getting to the bottom of what people actually want, asking a question that touches their heart,” she says. “What makes you feel safe, what makes you feel good? What makes you feel this is a person you can share a bathroom with? I can’t believe I let my husband share my bathroom. I don’t like it.” She laughs. “The specs are never going to work. The only thing that will work is discovering the way you want to be in this love.”
Materialists is full of thunderbolts, as clients come to admit that their pursuit is less about loving another person and more about how they themselves want to feel, which is valuable. “Why does a woman who’s five feet three inches need someone six feet tall?” Song asks. “Because when they walk into a room, they feel smarter, better. They feel they’re not losing. We all want to be an important person, to matter, to not be a nobody. But that’s not going to inspire love in you. The way my husband’s face is wrinkling is more inspiring of love to me than it was in his youth. The one place that’s not about winning is love. The only way to win is to surrender.”
To create chemistry on film, however, Song gives her actors specific motivations. “Lucy and Harry have the chemistry of two business partners who are popping champagne,” Song says. “They’re aligned. Whereas Lucy and John’s chemistry is about one person wanting something and the other person resisting.” When John and Lucy bump into each other at a wedding, where she’s trolling for clients and he’s slinging cocktails, Song told Johnson, “Lucy knows they’ll kiss.” But she told Evans, “John is trying his best not to kiss her. Having those two contradicting desires in one scene, that’s chemistry.”
It’s all about the yearning – between the characters, and between the movie and the audience. “There’s a voyeuristic element to all films,” Song says. “You’re watching intimate moments you otherwise wouldn’t have access to. I don’t know the personal lives even of my friends the way we get to experience Lucy’s. Drama doesn’t exist unless there’s something to yearn for, a longing that is being built in the audience. Even in Mission: Impossible, you’re yearning to make the impossible mission possible.” (Could Mission: Materialists be this summer’s Barbenheimer? Fingers crossed.)
Song knows she’s asking “the right question, for me: ‘How do we find that ancient feeling, love, which has been with us forever, but we still don’t know anything about?’ Now I want to see if there’s a response. With Past Lives, it was nothing but amazing, because there was a resounding response of ‘Yes! I’ve always wondered about this and had no language for it and I want to talk about it now.’ I felt so heard.”
“Because, beyond everything, what we want is to feel, ‘Hey, I’m not the only one,’” Song sums up, and I swear, goosebumps start rising on my neck. “It’s always about finding a way to feel less lonely. I feel less lonely now because of Past Lives. And you saying you’ve been thinking about Materialists, I feel even less lonely. That’s all I do, is think about it, and hearing that you do, too, now I’m not alone.” And that, my friends, is priceless.