Ten years before Past Lives, her first feature, scored two Oscar nominations, Celine Song was a playwriting graduate struggling to make ends meet in New York.
Between off-Broadway ambitions and other theatrical projects, she found a day job at an upmarket matchmaking agency, where her wealthy clients typically took a transactional view of love and marriage. The men demanded slim women under 30; the women, in turn, wanted men who were at least six feet tall. And everyone wanted a high-earning match.
“I became disillusioned with the job right away,” Song says. “Because you sit down and then they’re telling you all these numbers. I had just gotten married, and I was thinking, Well, all these numbers seem to matter very much. Fine, you want somebody who’s 6ft tall, but the average American man is 5ft 8in.
“Let’s say someone is 6ft tall. Hopefully, you fall in love with this person. Because if you are still together when you’re 90, you are going to shrink. We all are. I’m 5ft 4in now. I’m going to be 5ft 2in.
READ MORE
“And, also, the global economy is so broken; just because you have that big-salary job now doesn’t mean you’re going to have that job tomorrow. What happens once that person loses that job? Because it sounds like you just love the salary.”
But, for all the grasping demands and fanciful expectations Song faced, she was loath to abandon the matchmaking business. It was a wild ride for a former psychology student.
“If someone asks me, ‘What’s your drug of choice?’ I would say, ‘People’,” the film-maker, whose second feature, Materialists, has just been released, says. “I’m obsessed with people, especially these people. Because I’m in art, everybody I know is an artist. Suddenly I’m meeting private-equity managers.
“These people were looking at me and telling me what their heart desired. Telling me intimate details that they wouldn’t tell their therapists. I learned more about people in those six months than I did in any other part of my life.
“I was addicted to it. It was meant to be a day job. I’d pay rent with it and then I’d write. But then I realised I hadn’t written in five months. I had to quit because it was too fun.”
[ Materialists review: This non-romcom has the welcome oddness of a future classicOpens in new window ]
That fun has found expression in Song’s follow-up to Past Lives. Materialists plays as a contemporary spin on the pragmatic and economic dimensions of romantic relationships that Jane Austen famously addressed in the first line of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Song’s on-screen surrogate is Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a successful but cynical matchmaker who, in common with her clients, treats relationships like business deals.
She finds her carefully constructed worldview upended when she must choose between Harry (Pedro Pascal), a charming, wealthy (and tall) financier who seems to check all the boxes, and John (Chris Evans), a broke, jobbing-actor ex who knows that she likes to – yikes! – mix beer with Coca-Cola. An all-out war between the head and the heart ensues.
“The movie is about the commodification and objectification of human beings – in dating, yes, but also in work, in society at large,” Song says. “We’re pushed to present the ‘most valuable’ version of ourselves, like products. But merchandise can’t love merchandise. People can love people. And commodification inevitably leads to dehumanisation. You see it happen in the film.
“The question becomes, How are we supposed to find love – this ancient mystery and miracle – when dating is reduced to numbers like height, weight, income?
“People sometimes ask if finding love means lowering your standards. I’d never tell someone to compromise on what they’re truly entitled to: simply, that the person they love is in love with them.
“What worries me is how easily people accept a loveless relationship for material comfort while being rigid about things like height or income. You’re not entitled to those. You are entitled to love.”
For decades, from the screwball sparkle of It Happened One Night to the sleek charm of When Harry Met Sally, the romantic comedy was Hollywood’s most dependable comfort food. By the early 2000s the genre was in freefall as studios turned to blockbusters and hit indie variants – (500) Days of Summer, Safety Not Guaranteed – dried up. Materialists attempts to resuscitate the romcom as a date-night conversation starter.
It’s a criminally undervalued genre, the director says. “Romcoms are an invitation to meet characters who feel like us, to spend two hours exploring love, relationships, dating, marriage – and maybe to talk about being human. That potential is what excites me: it can be escapist fun or it can be a way into profound conversations about how we connect.”
In a brilliant piece on the romcom that Mindy Kaling wrote for the New Yorker magazine in 2011, the former Office star wrote: “I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character.”
With Materialists, Song has cannily evolved the genre away from the unattainable lux interiors that once defined, well, Heigl movies. (No wonder Song has just been tapped to write a sequel to My Best Friend’s Wedding, the hit 1990s romcom featuring Julia Roberts and Rupert Everett.)
[ ‘I’m a woman in my early 30s, and I’m exhausted by dating’Opens in new window ]
Despite the presence of Pascal’s financier, the characters inhabiting Song’s film are transparent about their financial lives: salaries, rents and debts. Evans’s John shares a cluttered Brooklyn flat with roommates who steal his phone charger and leave used condoms on the floor.
Love will always shrug off capitalism’s attempts to colonise it. That’s why love is freedom, and why it’s always worth it
“Love is the only thing that can’t truly be bought,” Song says. “But capitalism keeps trying to get people to believe that only the wealthy can be in love. Like Jeff Bezos’s insane Venice wedding. The media over-represents romance as something expressed through Cartier necklaces, Birkin bags, private restaurants rented out with a string quartet playing. All reserved for the wealthy.
“It creates the illusion that love is only for people with money. But love is ancient. Just because you’re wealthy doesn’t mean you can have more of it. You might have better luck in dating, but that doesn’t guarantee love. Love will always shrug off capitalism’s attempts to colonise it. That’s why love is freedom, and why it’s always worth it.”
Song was born in Seoul, in South Korea, into a family engaged in the arts; her father was a film-maker, and she was named after Juliet Berto’s character in Jacques Rivette’s knotty nouvelle-vague classic Céline and Julie Go Boating.
“I was always around film,” she says. “But I had to meet film-making. It was only when I started making my first film that I felt, ‘This is where I belong, in cinema. I’m going to do this forever.’”
[ Online dating fatigue: ‘Irish people are terrible on the apps’Opens in new window ]
When Song was 12 she relocated with her family to Ontario, in Canada. She later moved to New York, where she met her husband, Justin Kuritzkes – screenwriter of Challengers and Queer – and made a splash with the experimental-theatre production Endlings and a 2020 adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, constructed live within the video game The Sims 4.
“What I love about theatre is that the writer is the most important person,” she says. “The writer is the author. And I really got to enjoy being the author.”
Song’s transition from theatre to film with Past Lives, a story of childhood pals from Korea reuniting decades later in New York City, brought her to an international audience, including at Galway Film Fleadh, where it received its Irish premiere.
“I’ve always believed love is universal – everyone is obsessed with it,” she says. “Past Lives isn’t only about romance. It’s also about friendship and connections that last decades. Those things matter. When a big, burly man in Galway cried and told me it reminded him of his sweetheart in Dublin, I felt it again.
“If you speak honestly about love, people open up. They want to share their own stories. That belief carried into Materialists. If I’m honest about relationships, dating and marriage, audiences will be honest back. We’re all curious about love because it’s at the core of what makes us human.”
Materialists is on general release
