celine song

Materialists (2025)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

I’ve been seeing a lot of critical re-evaluation of Celine Song’s Past Lives in recent days, particularly as those who “saw through” its “mediocrity” from the beginning are feeling vindicated by the lukewarm reception of follow up feature Materialists. I couldn’t agree less about the quality of Past Lives, a movie I rated five stars and which was my third favorite film of 2023. On the other hand, that this movie is getting mixed to middling reviews isn’t a huge surprise to me, either. All the declarations that “the old-school romcom is back, baby!” that surrounded this film’s release may have been more of a threat than a promise. There’s also a tendency toward more drama than comedy, and there are moments where the slow burn that made Past Lives so powerful plays out here as more drawn out and tedious, but never so much that you’re ever truly bored. 

Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a professional matchmaker living in NYC for an organization called Adore. As the film opens, she is celebrating her ninth match that has resulted in a marriage, and she’ll be attending the wedding solo. At the wedding, she runs into her ex-boyfriend, aspiring actor John (Chris Evans), with whom she interacts warmly and fondly; she also meets brother of the groom Harry (Pedro Pascal), a handsome, wealthy socialite. Although she encourages Harry to join Adore as a client, citing that he’s a perfect package for their clientele and the proverbial “unicorn,” he seems most interested in pursuing her. In a flashback, we see that she and John broke up after an argument that was the result of his meager financial situation and both her frustration with his barely making ends meet and her own self-hatred over her materialistic nature. Meanwhile, in spite of her overall success in her field, Lucy is having trouble finding a good match for her client Sophie (Zoë Winters), a lawyer in her 30s, and when she thinks she’s finally made a good match, something tragic happens that shakes her faith in herself and her foundations. 

Materialists is about two things: the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, and what gets lost when love is treated like capital – a measurable, tradable commodity. Early on, Lucy compares her work to that of a mortician or an insurance claims agent, in that she treats matchmaking as a mechanical enterprise. Boxes checked in Subject A’s columns match boxes checked in Subject B’s column, and we’ve got love. She gives the hard sell on Adore to several of the women at her client’s wedding, talking about love as an ineffable and beautiful thing, that matchmaking isn’t about finding someone to be with for the next ten years but a “nursing home partner” and a “grave buddy.” It’s hard to tell where the real Lucy is in all of this, how much of what we see is her putting on a show, but when we see her in a moment of vulnerability with her boss, Violet (Marin Ireland), she admits that she’s not interested in dating because she wants her next partner to be her husband, and that her ultimate goal at present is to marry a man who is wealthy enough to provide for her. At other times when it’s clear that the facade is slipping, she tells John that he shouldn’t want to be with her because she believes that, at her core, she’s a cold, unfeeling person who is only concerned with marrying rich. She wishes that she could be the kind of woman whose love for John would have kept them together despite his inability to take her to fancy restaurants instead of the corner Halal stand, but she isn’t, at least not until the story that she’s told herself about who she is professionally crumbles. When Sophie is assaulted by the man that Lucy matched her with, Lucy is confronted with the unfortunate truth that this is something that happens in their business because many terrible people are able to charm their way past attempts to gatekeep them. Lucy realizes that her narrative of being the girlboss of twenty-first century luxury courtship is both (a) not true, and (b) perhaps not that important, and that love is more than a series of compatibility tests. 

What’s fascinating about the way that people talk about love is how transactional it all is. When the bride from the beginning of the film has cold feet, Lucy is ushered in to see her; the woman asks why she’s even getting married in the first place, since her family doesn’t need a cow or to seal a political pact through ritual like previous generations. Lucy leads her to the truth, that the bride’s sister’s jealousy over how the groom was more handsome and taller than her own husband made the pride feel valuable, and that gets her up on her feet and down the aisle. We get a montage of several of Lucy’s clients, both men and women, and these segments lean a little bit more into the comedy than the mostly dramatic film. Although Sophie is the first one that Lucy interacts with on screen (over a phone call) and it makes her come across as shallow and unpleasable, but she pales in comparison to some of the people we meet later. There’s one client who clearly doesn’t know or doesn’t care how his requests come across, as he opens by talking about wanting to meet a woman who shares similar interests, who’s seen all the old classics and probably likes the same kind of music, but he also insists that his potential matches be in their twenties (he is forty-eight); when pressed, he says that even twenty-seven is “basically thirties.” Lucy has to put on a pleasant face with all of them, and it’s clear that she finds many of these people to be creepy and weird, but she also lives inside of their world insofar as she also treats love like, as she herself puts it, math, and the film is about her realization that there are some things that can’t be reduced to numbers and checklists. 

This one doesn’t have the same heart as Past Lives did, and I don’t think that it’s trying to. That film was much more introspective and thoughtful, and this one isn’t trying to recreate that tone so much as explore a different one. It’s also a more standard and formulaic one, but at least it’s been a while since there was such an earnest send-up of the canonical romantic comedy. It’s subversive in that there’s never a moment when the love triangle seems like it could ever possibly resolve with anything other than John and Lucy giving things another chance. Harry’s successful wining and dining of Lucy requires that we buy that our leading lady’s character arc will be accepting that she’s exactly as shallow and materialistic as she perceives (the persona she has created of) herself to be and she’ll be picking the rich guy? Be real. Within this paradigm of two love interests, one rich and one poor, for there to be a narrative at all requires that she not end up with the guy in whom she initially expresses a shallow interest. Where this breaks from the mould of the standard plot structure is that most of these films would have both love interests vying for Lucy at the same time, but the film is fairly well bifurcated right in the middle where she moves from one to the other, with the rejected partner disappearing from the plot after Lucy’s life is upended. 

A lot of whether this film will work for you depends on how you feel about Dakota Johnson and her acting style. Prior to her matchmaking career Lucy was, like John, attempting to make it as an actress, but she got a regular (well, sort of) job instead while he continued to pursue his artistic passions. This means that there is a conversation in which Lucy says things like “I decided acting wasn’t for me,” and “I was never a very good actor,” and I just know that the moment this movie hits video on demand, people are going to run wild with screenshots of these moments and attempt to use them to dunk on Dakota. In this house, we call those haters, and there’s not a hate campaign in this world strong enough to make me turn on my Madame Web. Before she was a director, Song was a playwright (and a matchmaker), and it’s in the scenes in which Lucy interacts with clients that the film feels the most like a stage play, with strong repartee, and it’s in these scenes that Johnson is the most believable. She’s as charming here to me as she was in Am I OK?, but while this film is much more well-made and richly photographed, it doesn’t connect with me on an emotional level. 

When I sat in the darkness staring up at Past Lives two years ago, it resonated with me deeply. Like Hae Sung, I had recently socially encountered an old … well, an old something let’s say, and the spark that still lingered there was such a powerful reminder of what that kind of interaction could feel like that I broke things off with someone I had been seeing casually for a couple of months because that electricity and chemistry wasn’t there. Circumstances with my old flame meant that, like Hae Sung and Nora, it could never be, no matter how much in-yun there may have been between us. There was a potency to the reality of it all that left an indelible imprint on me, and which simply is not a presence in Materialists. It may not be fair to judge this movie based on that criterion, especially since Materialists isn’t trying to be as deep as its author’s previous work, but it is nonetheless an area that it’s lacking. And before you jump to the conclusion that I may have overrated Past Lives as a result of my empathic rapport with its characters, you should know that I actually cried more during Materialists than I did Past Lives. The movie wasn’t connecting with me on the same emotional level as Hae Sung did, but the treatment of love as capital and the way that the film utilized that to find places in me that are still smarting from more recent misadventures and tribulations in the bottomless open sea that is contemporary love and dating … it did get to me. It didn’t get to me by resonance; it just happened to make me recall some misfires of late and then give me too much time to dwell on those before the film moved on to the next scene. When I watch Past Lives again, I will cry again. This one? Not so much. 

This is a cute movie. Serviceable, occasionally goofy, and mostly charming, I’m glad that it exists, even if I’m not sure it will have staying power. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

You Can’t Wake Up if You Don’t Fall Asleep

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

I am no longer a true believer in the oft-repeated Ebert quote, “The movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” Or, I at least no longer believe that empathy is the most interesting or noble thing the movies machine can generate.  The more I’ve succumbed to incurable cinephilia in recent years the less interested I’ve become in the movies’ ability to document or reflect objective reality back at the audience, as if we don’t get more than enough real-life tedium outside the theater walls.  Even if there’s value to learning and vicariously experiencing the intimate details of each other’s lives through cinema, reducing the artform to its ability to generate empathy feels small & unimaginative, especially if that’s the only thing on a movie’s mind.  Subtlety, restraint, and adherence to real-world logic are boring, self-imposed restrictions for a medium that’s so apt for dreams & poetry.  It’s just as much of a well-worn cliché, but I’ve come to the point where cinema’s function as a machine that generates shared, communal dreams is its primary cultural value to me.  Empathy is a useful byproduct of the movie dream machine, but it’s at best secondary to the way cinema can deeply submerge us in the subconscious id of the artists behind it.  If a filmmaker is using the art of the moving image to achieve anything other than full sensory intoxication or communal mesmerism, they might as well write prose or record a podcast instead.  There’s so much more to the medium than farming empathy in the documentation or dramatic retelling of each other’s daily drudgery.

At least, that’s what I was thinking about while watching a double feature of this summer’s most critically lauded works: Wes Anderson’s ensemble cast sci-fi comedy Asteroid City and Celine Song’s long-distance relationship breakdown Past Lives.  I likely shouldn’t have bothered seeing Past Lives at all, since subtle, tastefully underplayed dramas aren’t really my thing.  I do allow myself to get talked into seeing a few gloomy exercises in real-world restraint every year, though, if not just to see what everyone else is gushing about while I’m seeking out high-style histrionics & novelty.  I had about the same experience with Past Lives as I had with last year’s similarly lauded & restrained Aftersun: respect for its craft but bafflement over its ecstatic praise, since practically every film festival is overflowing with similarly subtle, underplayed titles just like it (most of which never land proper distribution).  In contrast, I watched Asteroid City for the second time in 24 hours on that double bill and found its dreamlike artifice much more emotionally rewarding than Past Lives‘s real-world resignation.  In The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson self-assessed how his fussy live-action New Yorker cartoons function as populist entertainment; in Asteroid City, the self-assessment peers inward, shifting to their function as emotional Trojan horses. I found the former funnier but the latter more affecting, sinking several layers of framing-devices deeper into his subconscious to pick at the same somber tones of yearning & heartbreak as Past Lives with less of a literal, straight-forward approach.  It likely says less about the merits of the movies than it says about my facilities as an audience that I needed to puzzle at the complex narrative structure & fussy visual craft of Asteroid City (a movie within a stage play within a television special) to enjoy its small, intimate character moments for their own pleasure, while Past Lives was willing to serve those pleasures to me directly. Apparently, to fully appreciate the small things I need them buried under a crushing excess of style & artifice; I need to feel like they came to me in a dream.

The pattern repeated with my library DVD haul that same week, which happened to include two coming-of-age stories about young women: the 70s-set Judy Blume adaptation Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and the French dirt-bike crime thriller Rodeo.  One was a critically-lauded empathy machine that documents and validates the awkwardness & inner turmoil of puberty in all young American girls who are impatient to become young American women.  The other alternates between the quiet restraint of a crime world docudrama and the sensory free-for-all of a legitimate art piece, submerging the audience in the dreams & volatile emotions of one particular teenage reprobate with an ecstatic passion for racing stolen dirt bikes.  You can likely guess which one I preferred.  Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is less extraordinary than it is warmly familiar.  It reminded me of a lot of classic comfort watches that I grew up with in the 1990s: Mermaids, My Girl, Now & Then, etc.  It’s a pleasant movie about pleasant people, one that directly asks you to empathize with common, everyday rites of passage.  Rodeo is a much thornier picture.  It documents the experiences of real-world dirt bike stunt racers by casting them as their own fictional avatars and—in the case of its disgruntled antiheroine—inviting you into their prophetic nightmares of self-destruction & immolation.  There’s no reason to contrast & compare the two movies other than that my public library requests for them happened to be fulfilled on the same day; they’re as structurally & aesthetically distinct from each other as the vintage postcard artifice of Asteroid City and the real-world melancholy of Past Lives.  The same questions of which film was making better, more purposeful use of their shared medium were rattling around in my empty skull, though, and I again came down in favor of the dream machine over the empathy machine.

I’ve been writing reviews for this humble movie blog for eight years now, which is a long enough duration that I can’t help but reflect on what I value in this artform I’ve spent so much time admiring & picking apart.  Wes Anderson’s spent at least three decades admiring & picking apart the artform himself, and Asteroid City appears to find him arriving at similar conclusions.  Throughout the film, performers within his multi-layered narrative break character to question the meaning behind their dialogue & actions as written, as well as their place within specific framing devices at specific times.  The Anderson avatar who wrote the piece they’re performing has no clear answers for the reasoning behind his words, only that they work to express subconscious emotion.  In a climactic scene that lovingly parodies The Twilight Zone, the performers stare at the camera directly and chant “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” in a rhythmic, zombified monotone, reinforcing that to experience & share in that subconscious emotion the audience must give into the artifice of the work and forget the reasoning behind it.  We have to dream.  As thoughtful & empathetic as they are, neither Past Lives nor Are You There God? ever fully fall asleep; they are awake to the logical restrictions of the real world.  Rodeo drifts along in that in-between state you feel just before you fall asleep, purposefully confusing a documentation of reality with the shared-dream intoxication of cinema, only fully letting go of the handlebars in its emotional climax.  Of this group, only Asteroid City fully falls asleep, and I found its emotional provocations the most effective among them because they were allowed to be as indirect and inexplicable as our own internal responses to the world outside our heads.  It would be foolish to expect every movie to interact with (or entirely ignore) reality in that way, but the ones that do so are the ones that are most fully engaging with the tools, methods, and uses of the artform.

-Brandon Ledet

Past Lives (2023)

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

There’s a little piece of quotational wisdom that’s never far from my mind: “Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it.” That it comes from The Muppet Christmas Carol and is recited by Kermit the Frog does not make it less poignant, or less true. Sometimes, when those words resurface in my mind, I also recall illustrator Olivia de Recat’s simple line drawings of closeness lines over time, which depict how two individual lives intersect (or don’t) based on the way that relationships change over time. They’re minimalistic, with only two lines in each image, but they resonate: the gentle curves of “first love” speak volumes, the angular intersection of “one night stand” has a kind of vivacious energy that I love, and the “friends with benefits” lines, where one party starts to move away from the other and the second party tries to follow before separating in a way that can only be described as dejected, is my personal favorite. I recently acted it out (or had it enacted upon me), actually, and I walked away from that schism having taken some real psychic damage. Past Lives has come along at exactly the right moment to make sense of everything by envisioning meetings and partings in a way that breathes meaning and beauty into our sadnesses, our joys, and our presumed certainties. 

Twenty-four years ago, Na Young and Hae Sung were classmates, competitors, best friends, and potentially more. When we meet them, at age 12, Na Young is trying not to cry over the fact that Hae Sung has bested her academically, perhaps for the first time. Unfortunately, their halcyon days of walking home together from school and playing among public sculptuary are cut short by Na Young’s family’s immigration to Canada. Twelve years pass, and Na Young, now going by her Anglicized name of Nora Moon (Greta Lee), is a student playwright in NYC. While on the phone with her mother, she decides to look Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) up on Facebook and discovers that he has tried to reach out to her. The two reconnect and share the maximum level of emotional intimacy that two people on opposite sides of the planet communicating via a glitchy Skype connection can. Unable to meet in person for a prolonged period of time because of their individual studies, the two take a temporary break that lasts a lot longer than either intended. Nora meets Arthur (John Magaro) at a writing residency, and she tells him about the concept of in-yun, a concept relating to fate that paints the serendipitous connections of life as predestined. Twelve years later, Nora and Arthur are married and still in NYC, and Hae Sung comes to visit, supposedly on vacation, but really to reunite. The immediate and intense magnetism between the two is palpable, but their paths have been going in opposite directions for so long that their destinies may be forever parted. 

Early in the film, Na Young’s mother explains to Hae Sung’s that she and her husband have chosen to immigrate despite having good careers and social networks because, to paraphrase, when you let go of something, you also gain something. It’s a very simple idea in a sparse text, but it’s nonetheless true. Nora and Hae Sung both recognize this, but in different ways and at different points in their lives, and they realize the opposite as well, that hanging onto something means the death (at least in this life) of all the things that might have been. Nora meets Arthur when she lets Hae Sung go, and Hae Sung meets his unnamed girlfriend at about the same time. Hae Sung, at 24, is insistent that he hang onto the blueprint of his planned career by going to Shanghai to learn Mandarin instead of taking the option to learn English in NYC and be near Nora instead, and in so doing ensures that there is only one path this life will take — one without her, even if he doesn’t realize it at the time. In the film, as in life, there are a million little moments where the choices of holding fast or letting go have an effect that echoes throughout one’s lifetime (or lifetimes), and in every single one, I felt the intensity of each of those tiny, almost imperceptible forks in the road. When Nora and Hae Sung start talking to each other again at 24, there’s a sense of such  in every wording choice that feels immense in the way that every exchange of words with a crush or someone you feel an intense connection to but aren’t intimately familiar with always feels … portentous. That blending of the feeling of getting to know one another (again, or for the first time) and that sense of something so much bigger taking form on the horizon, it’s effervescent and light and yet so big, so bold, so beautiful. 

Past Lives is truly a perfect title. Each time that the two meet, so much about themselves has changed, to the point that they don’t perceive themselves as the same people. This is textual; at one point, Nora draws a distinction between her adult self and the child Na Young that Hae Sung used to know. Hae Sung, however, still sees Na Young inside of Nora, and she does the same for him; they may not be literally reincarnated, but they are different people with something innate and unchanging inside that they recognize in one another. This cycle is reinforced in the way that Nora and Hae Sung see each other only every twelve years, like clockwork. Even the location choices reiterate the cyclical nature of the two’s relationship: on the day that they reunite in their thirties, the two are framed against Jane’s Carousel, and they later also take the ferry tour around the Statue of Liberty. Both are rides that ultimately end in the same place that they begin and then cycle again, in a lovely metaphor. 

Nora is a fascinating character, and Greta Lee is an astonishing performer. This is a sparse movie, with very little non-diegetic sound and music sprinkled in only very occasionally, and that aesthetic plays out on screen as well, with a lot of the performance of Nora coming down to the smallest of facial movements on both Lee and Teo’s parts, the tiniest wrinkling of doubt, the smallest twinge of hope at the edge of the lip, the almost imperceptible brow tightening of longing deferred. It’s pure magic, and it wouldn’t work if we didn’t spend so much time with these two people, learning them. In a different world, there’s a version of this narrative where we love Nora a little less, find her dismissal of Hae Sung in 2012 cold and heartless, or find her honesty with her husband and her reassurances to him hollow and false, but Lee imbues Nora with an almost impossible level of likability. We see ourselves in her. She papers over the things that she can’t control by making blanket statements of agency that are questionably true: when her parents choose to immigrate to Canada, she tells her friends that she wants to go, supposedly so that she can one day win the Nobel Prize (at age 24, this dream has changed to winning the Pulitzer, and at 36, when prompted by Hae Sung, she jokes that she’s now aiming for a Tony). When realizing that she and Hae Sung will not see each other for at least a year when they reconnect in 2012, she tells him that she needs a break to focus on her life in New York, but we know that this isn’t completely true because she begins dating Arthur very shortly thereafter. Lee deftly navigates all of this, and I can’t wait to see more of her.  

I’m hesitant to make a comparison between this film and one with a white person at the directorial helm and starring an entirely white European cast, but I feel I must; when I walked out of the theater, I felt much the same as I did when I left my screening of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It wasn’t just the sparsity of intrusions from more filmic elements, or that both filmmakers were named Celine, but in the way that both works are about loves which are so vast that they fill up every space that presents itself and thus feel certain and immovable, but which are ultimately all-too-fragile. There’s a scene in Past Lives in which Nora walks through the empty house that will be her home for the duration of her writing residency and we get to hear every footstep as she crosses the space, just as every footfall in Portrait was likewise audible and meaningful; later, there’s a loud metallic thump when Nora walks over a metal grate on the sidewalk. It’s human, it’s real, it’s tangible. That doesn’t always mean that some alchemical process of “art” is happening, but in a movie so intimate and so suffused with longing as Past Lives, the magic is there. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond