Get the latest gossip
Materialists Is an Inert Misreading of Modern Romance
Celine Song’s latest romantic film seeks to be both a frothy fantasy and a treatise on the nature of modern love. It fails at both.
Played with a chilly, unaffected air by Dakota Johnson in writer-director Celine Song’s second film, Materialists, Lucy is a practical-minded “eternal bachelorette,” here to mark another of her matches as successful as they enter the pearly gates of heteronormativity: marriage. Materialists takes the barest skin of the rom-com genre’s trappings — crisp interiors, airy cinematography, warm and bright color grading, aspirational jobs, the click of heels on pavement (the auditory signal of a determined girl boss) — and uses them for a story of little feeling. The film devolves into vacuity as it tries to provide answers about how class shapes romantic possibilities, heterosexual strife, and, most crucially, the sexual assault of a long-held client, Sophie (Zoë Winters), previously described as having “no specialty” in the marketplace of modern desire.
Or read this on VULTURE