IN CELINE SONG’S ‘MATERIALISTS,’ LOVE IS SERIOUS BUSINESS

The Korean-Canadian filmmaker's buzzy romance film is in theatres now.

About halfway through Korean-Canadian filmmaker Celine Song’s new romantic dramedy, Materialists, Dakota Johnson’s Lucy is sitting at a bar, vaguely confiding in her ex, John (Chris Evans), about something that has been troubling her at the boutique matchmaking firm she works at. John, in an attempt to comfort Lucy, says, “It’s just dating. It’s not that serious.” But his words don’t have their intended effect. Instead, Lucy reels back, angry and hurt, taking John to mean that dating—and therefore love—is “just girl shit.” 

While there is nothing wrong with “girl shit,” for Lucy, romance is so much more than something deemed frivolous by men and Important Thinkers—it’s about as serious as you can get. And Song, who is known for 2023’s Oscar-nominated film Past Lives, feels the same. That’s why she made Materialists (in theatres now): to create something that treats the subject matter with the seriousness it deserves. “It’s part of [everything] I write: to be as direct and as honest as I can be about all of the ways I personally feel as a human being,” she tells ELLE Canada. “That’s the only way I can inspire honesty and open-heartedness from the people encountering my work. It’s the only way I can say that I want to have this conversation.”

And Materialists has a lot to say about love—things that are blunt, things that are optimistic and, above all, things that are deeply felt but hard to actually verbalize. The movie is inspired by Song’s brief stint years ago as a matchmaker and follows Lucy, a 30-something in the same profession as she gets caught in a crossroads, finding herself torn between a new suitor, the charming and wealthy Harry (Pedro Pascal) and struggling actor John, who has recently re-emerged in her life. In Lucy’s work, dating is both a game and a business. She can take the most basic facts about someone—their age, occupation, salary, family background, political beliefs—and distill what their “value” is. She never does this in a harsh, judgmental way, even as she “calculates” how her clients would pair up based on hours spent listening to people unabashedly list off the traits they want from their romantic partner. She is part therapist, part economist; dating is the market, and people are the commodity. 

But while dating is easy for Lucy, love is not. She describes herself as an eternal bachelorette and voluntarily celibate, and is left disillusioned and resentful that her relationship with John ended years ago because they were constantly fighting about money (particularly their lack of it). She believes in the work she does for her clients, slotting them together like puzzle pieces, but knows she can’t leap the emotional hurdle for them. “She says that she is an expert in dating, but not an expert in love, and I think that distinction is very important,” Song says. “Dating is a game that we’re all playing in pursuit of love, but the truth about love is that it is a miracle. I always describe it as like lightning. Sometimes love happens—I wish there was a great reason or a mathematical formula for it, but, at the end of the day, it is the divine. Lucy says that ‘love is easy because it just walks through the door one day,’ and that really is the thing. It’s both easy and difficult, because it’s difficult to continue to have faith in it in a world that is so cynical and where everything can be gained by algorithms and calculations. It’s very hard to believe in something that sounds like a child made up.”

Baked into this challenge is the fact that Lucy’s clients feel entitled to the things they want, but they don’t feel entitled to love. They are playing the game just like Lucy, and with serious intent. They rigorously work out, they vie for promotions, they get Botox and plastic surgery and gruelling leg-lengthening procedures also that when they ask for a partner of a certain age, tax bracket or BMI, they feel as though they’ve earned it. “We are trying to turn ourselves into value objects; we compare ourselves to every other human being on earth and their value, and that’s where all of these feelings of not being enough come from,” Song says. “It’s so much of what drives these characters—the desire to feel valuable, which, of course, is driven by the feeling that you’re not. We treat ourselves as merchandise … and that leads us to dehumanization.” 

Based on marketing materials alone, Materialists looks like a romcom setting out to settle a love triangle, but it’s this distinction between value and love that is at its heart. Lucy has to figure out how to turn off the mental valuations and admit to herself what are deepest, most genuine desires are beyond the checklists of perfect-on-paper potential candidates. “Part of Lucy’s journey is to actually take a leap of faith and surrender to love—that’s the only way you’re going to get to have love in your life,” Song says. “Lucy has to accept that she is a person and the only thing she is entitled to is not money, it’s not somebody who makes her feel valuable, it’s love. That’s it. And that’s really hard to accept for Lucy, for John, for Harry and for all of us, because it’s hard to believe that we deserve or are worthy of love. Everyone is embarrassed to admit how much they want to be loved. That is the most difficult thing to do, and, therefore, the most brave thing we can do.”

That scene in the bar with John’s implication of “girl shit,” then, is a key step for Lucy in recognizing just how much she’s been hiding from love. It sets her on a path of taking love as seriously for herself as she does her clients. But it’s also Song’s way of asserting the conversation and trying to get the rest of us on the same page. She admits so herself. “The topic of love and the problems of love are often dismissed as not a serious topic, and Lucy is rebuffing—like, ‘No, this is very, very high stakes and it’s a great drama in all of our lives. I think this is where I’m kind of slipping into the scene,” Song says. “The romance genre is so often dismissed—they get called ‘chick flicks’ because they are not serious. And that’s really upsetting. First of all, it dismisses ‘chicks’ as serious people. Secondly, it’s also sad for ‘serious’ people, because then they’re saying matters of the heart are not worthy of serious people.

“But something I learned from Past Lives is that everybody is obsessed with love. You can ask the smartest people on earth—people who know everything about physics and how the universe works—about their love lives, and their answer is always going to be, ‘Ugh, man, I don’t know.’ It makes fools of us all. That’s what I really love about love. It’s the one human domain where we are not only encouraged to, but the only solution is to completely surrender and allow ourselves to be clueless.”  

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The post In Celine Song’s 'Materialists,' Love Is Serious Business appeared first on Elle Canada.

2025-06-13T11:13:37Z