Materialists director Celine Song reveals big problem with modern dating

Yahoo

2 days ago

The Past Lives director used to be a matchmaker like Dakota Johnson's character in her new film, and she tells Yahoo UK how the experience shaped Materialists.
Finding love can be difficult. With online dating taking precedence, there are fewer opportunities to meet people offline, and one might even turn to matchmaking services as depicted in Celine Song's new film Materialists. But modern dating has its own problems, the director tells Yahoo UK, because it is "turning us into commodities".
"In 2025, objectification and commodification has gotten worse because it's easier," Song explains. "Now we're so online, our identities are so there, and wealth is really overrepresented online."
The Oscar-nominated director explores this and the theme of love in Materialists in a very different way to her critically acclaimed debut, Past Lives. The film stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a matchmaker who is forced to question everything she thinks she knows about dating when she meets charming millionaire Harry (Pedro Pascal) and reunites with her old flame John (Chris Evans) on the same night.
This might seem a ripe premise for a rom-com, and it was certainly marketed as such, but the film is more introspective in its exploration of the issues of modern dating. It is, Song says, "a rom-com, it's just not escapist." That's because the director once worked as a matchmaker herself and wanted to share a realistic take on dating following her experience.
"I worked as a matchmaker in my twenties because I couldn't pay rent, it was my day job because I was a playwright so I thought I would get a day job and that just kind of ended up being the only day job I could get," Song says.
"I did it for about six months and, because I learned more about people in those six months than I did in any other part of my life, I left feeling like 'I'm gonna write something about it one day', and here it is."
Song is a charming, refreshingly open person, and we bond easily during our short time together after learning we met our respective partners around the same time and avoided online dating completely in the process. We also both find it amusing, and rather ironic, that we're talking about her film's exploration of the merits of love and marriage when I'll be heading straight to a wedding dress fitting straight after our chat.
"Me and my husband [screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes] predated Tinder; we were still meeting organically at the time, we knew that online dating existed but it wasn't quite there," Song reflects. "Now, of course, I think the dating market has just fully moved onto our phones."
"I worked as a matchmaker when online dating had just started fully happening, like 2016. But I actually think it is a little bit different now because things have only gotten worse," she adds.
"I feel like the movie is about objectification and commodification of human beings, right? And we see that in the way that the dating market is. It exists in the job market, it exists online, it's turning every human resource into an algorithm, like you can see the way that AI is, in a way we are turning ourselves into objects and commodities.
"The most important line in the film is 'I'm not merchandise.' A piece of merchandise cannot love another piece of merchandise, but a person may have a shot at loving another person. I think there's something about that.
"The thing that's really important is that we remember that commodification and objectification of human beings is going to always lead to dehumanisation, which we see in the movie."
The filmmaker discovered a lot in her time as a matchmaker, and is frank about the cold and disconnected way people would try to look for love at the time: "I feel like dating is a game we all play in pursuit of love. Something that I learned is the way that we're talking about dating, and the way we talk about what we want in our love, felt like it was contradictory to what love is.
"Because I would ask somebody like, 'Well, who are you looking for? What are you looking for?' And then they would say height, weight, income, and age. And then I would just know that none of those things matter."
It's this notion that Song tries to bring across in Materialists through the character of Lucy, who spends her days trying to find out who ticks the right boxes for her clients. It's detached because her clients are detached, focused on looks and little else, like Song experienced. However this dehumanisation takes its toll on both Lucy and one of her clients.
Focusing on the superficial felt contradictory, Song says: "At the time I was [a matchmaker] I'd just gotten married and I myself was trying to understand love and marriage and relationships. and I remember thinking none of these things —height, weight and all these numbers— seem to mean anything or even be that helpful when it comes to the thing that marriage is, and I think that when it comes to love all the numbers go out the window.
"But I felt that contradiction when I was a matchmaker, I think that's what I really wanted to make the movie about. I wanted to talk about the way we talk about dating and then also what love is, which is a great ancient mystery, and total miracle when it happens, right?
"The truth is the one thing that should be the non-negotiable for you when you're dating is that the person who is meant to love you loves you, that's the only thing."
This is an idea that Song explored so brilliantly in Past Lives, but she while one might assume having your first film land an Oscar nomination would make the follow-up a stressful experience, Song says she didn't feel any different. She was happy returning to similar themes for Materialists despite the pressure, in fact having a successful first movie probably helped.
"I think it's really funny cause I feel like the pressure over the first film is so intense because you could also make your first movie and nobody really thinks about it or cares about it," she says. "So I think that the truth is whether it's gonna be my second movie or my fifth movie the pressure is not gonna be any different. It's always gonna be there.
"Like with my fifth movie I'll be like 'oh my God, my fifth movie!' But I think what I actually really loved is, having already made a movie, it was easier to ask people to have faith in this movie, getting it made, and it being great. So I think, to me, it was only actually a positive thing that Past Lives went well."
Materialists premieres in UK cinemas on Friday, 15 August.