‘Height, weight, job, lifestyle': How a matchmaker's shopping list spawned a star-studded romcom

The Age

2 days ago

For about 10 years, Celine Song struggled to make a living in New York as a playwright. At one point, she realised she had better get a day job if she was going to pay her rent. The usual thing, she thought, was to make coffee or pull beers, but she soon discovered that a lot of other struggling artists had nabbed those hospo side-hustles before she got to town.
'To be a barista you need like 10 years of experience,' she says. 'To be a bartender you need 15 years.' It was then that someone at a party told her about matchmaking, which seemed to require no experience whatsoever. She applied to a dating agency; she got the job. She stayed just six months but, by the time she left, she knew she would one day write about it.
Materialists is the second feature by the 36-year-old filmmaker; Past Lives (2023), which was nominated for two Oscars, including best film, also drew on an aspect of her own experience. Its heroine, Nora (Greta Lee), was a playwright, born in Korea but now living in New York and married to an American screenwriter (John Magaro). The pull of cultures within her comes to the surface when her primary school sweetheart (Teo Yoo), left behind when her family emigrated, finds her on social media. The film is a poignant meditation on missed chances and blocked choices. For many of us, it was the film of the year.
Her new film, billed as a romcom, is a much starrier affair. Dakota Johnson plays Lucy the matchmaker, albeit one with many more runs on the board than Song achieved: nine marriages concluded, as she tells her agency colleagues with a simpering giggle. Lucy's winning MO is to become soulmate to her clients, who pay big bucks (anywhere from $US2000 to $US200,000 in real life, according to Google) for access to the right kind of prospect. The clients come with shopping lists. One man in his 40s insists he couldn't consider a woman over 25. Women stipulate that they're not considering anyone under six feet. At these prices, they want deluxe goods.
Lucy herself is single. It is five years since her painful breakup with John (Chris Evans – yes, Captain America!), a struggling off-off-Broadway actor who was passionate about her but poor. Money, or the lack of it, destroyed their relationship; when she meets suave, witty and supremely well-heeled Harry (Pedro Pascal), he seems to be a dream come true. As they sink for the first time beneath his satin sheets, she asks how much his apartment is worth. The question doesn't faze him: $US12 million, he tells her. Bliss! What's not to love?
All this accumulation of telling detail comes from Song's experience. 'I think I learned more about people in that six months [at the dating agency] than at any other period of my life, because people are very honest – more honest, I always think, than with a therapist,' she says. 'They would start describing the boyfriend they want and it was amazing the extent to which the language was like the language in the film: height, weight, job, lifestyle. Like at the morgue or the insurance company, everything was in numbers.'
It didn't seem to have much to do with love. 'I knew love doesn't happen that way,' says Song, a professed romantic. She was already married, to screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (who wrote the scripts for Challengers and Queer).
'For me, the gap between this game we were playing and what love really is seemed too vast,' Song says. 'There's no amount of doing the math, being smart or playing the game correctly that is going to get you to this very ancient, mysterious thing. All you can hope for is that it walks into your life one day and you know how to recognise it. That tension was something I was facing as a matchmaker.'
Having invested in access to potential partners, clients would ready themselves for market with self-improvements, ranging from the ostensibly benign – going to the gym – to an excruciating and hugely expensive operation, undertaken by one character in the film, to increase his height by breaking and remaking his leg bones.
'So much of this has to do with trying to enhance the value of this material thing you have, which is your body,' says Song. 'I do think it's a very scary thing. It is part of this commodification of the self, trying to turn yourself into the most valuable object possible. And at the end of that journey you're like: 'Why wouldn't you get a surgery to get a little taller? Why wouldn't you get Botox to look a little younger?' You start to get no sense of why you wouldn't do any of these things, just following that logic that you are an asset.' One of the characters in Materialists, after her umpteenth rejection, protests that she is a person, not a piece of merchandise. This comes to her as a revelation.
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Materialists is billed as a romcom but, while it is often funny, it has a much sharper edge than the marketing suggests. I observe that the actors she has cast – the famously charming Pascal, the Fifty Shades ingenue Johnson – bring associations with them that are, in themselves, a kind of asset. Song bridles. She chooses her actors for their talent, she says, and their awareness of the subject.
''I'm a person and not merchandise' is part of the philosophical part of being an actor,' she says. 'Because, of course, so many actors and models, people who are seen on screen, are often treated like merchandise. Every actor in my movie completely understood the film – and they understood it very deeply in their souls.'
So I wonder, given such serious intent, why she chose the vehicle of romantic comedy? 'Well, the romcom is one of my favourite genres,' she says. 'And I think it is a genre with a beautiful accessibility to every single person on Earth. What is amazing about the romcom is that you get to walk into a movie theatre and get to talk about love, relationships, feelings and marriage and dating for two hours – what an amazing gift!'
From the cast to the studio executives, she says, everyone who sees the film wants to talk to her afterwards about their own love lives. 'So I think of Materialists as the start of a conversation.'
Romcoms are, of course, routinely dismissed as fluff. 'To which my answer is I wonder what happened to our culture, that love started to be considered not to be a serious subject?' says Song. 'I am concerned about that, because love is the most dramatic thing that everybody does. Everybody contends with love, dating, relationships – whether there are any, there being a lack, there being a lot, everything.'
The genre has been downgraded over time, she believes, as mere 'girl shit'. The usual formation – as in her film – consists of a woman choosing between two men. 'It's a genre where a woman has so much power and gets to make a lot of decisions – and where, traditionally, a woman is the lead character,' she says. Compared with fighting the Entity while climbing around the wings of a light plane in mid-air, as Tom Cruise does in the latest Mission: Impossible, it's seen as small potatoes.
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'But I think: what a powerful thing, that we get to see a woman make a choice in her life, right? I think that is completely worthy of cinema.'