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When Elizabeth Bennet first gets a\u00a0glimpse of Pemberley, Mr Darcy\u2019s enormous estate, she experiences a\u00a0fleeting pang of \u200b\u201c<\/span>something like regret\u201d over the marriage proposal she rejected and the loss of the home that would have been hers. In her follow up to\u00a0<\/span>Past Lives<\/i><\/a>. Celine Song doesn\u2019t update Jane Austen \u00e0\u00a0la\u00a0<\/span>Clueless<\/i>, but she is concerned with the age-old tussle between marriage and money, the commodification of romantic relationships, and what we think we want versus what we really need.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n After a\u00a0rather sweet, knowingly silly prologue of a\u00a0cave man proposing to his cave girlfriend, we meet Lucy (Dakota Johnson), the star employee of an elite New York matchmaking service who\u2019s grown accustomed to the finer things. She sees marriage purely as a\u00a0business proposition \u2013 a\u00a0mathematical formula to be followed. At the lavish wedding of two of her clients she encounters rich, eminently eligible bachelor Harry (Pedro Pascal), a \u200b\u201c<\/span>unicorn\u201d candidate for matchmaking who\u2019s only interested in pursuing her. Meanwhile, she\u2019s unexpectedly drawn towards her broke ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a\u00a0struggling actor picking up catering shifts and still living with his gross flatmates in his late thirties.<\/span><\/p>\n But what\u2019s been sold by A24<\/span><\/span> and Sony as a\u00a0sparkling who-will-she-choose love triangle (complete with Team Pedro and Team Chris t\u2011shirts) is initially more cynical than its marketing would have you believe. Inspired by her own time as a\u00a0New York City matchmaker, Song is more concerned with capitalism\u2019s encroachment on love than indulging romcom conventions. We see montages of Lucy\u2019s clients listing their non-negotiables: a\u00a0certain height, weight, salary, age or even race. They feel entitled to carve up their prospective life partners into dehumanised assets, and as amusing as these sequences are, in a\u00a0tonal lurch we also see the very real danger of flattening people into products.<\/span><\/p>\n Dakota Johnson, with her unbelievably glossy hair and affectless performance style, is convincing as an emotionally repressed Cool Girl on the hunt for a\u00a0rich husband, but has a\u00a0harder time selling Lucy\u2019s vulnerability. Evans and Pascal are charming enough but neither has much to do \u2013 not one member of this painfully attractive trio is especially well drawn, each feeling more like an idea than an individual.<\/span><\/p>\n And yet despite these not insignificant flaws,\u00a0<\/span>Materialists<\/i>, shot on gorgeous 35<\/span>mm, does manage to capture something of the sheer inexplicable miracle of romance in a\u00a0world that wants us to view each other as disposable. Its core message of love over luxury might sound trite, but the proliferation on social media of regressive ideas about men providing for women financially (see Song\u2019s astute response to a\u00a0Letterboxd review describing the film as \u200b\u201c<\/span><\/span>broke man propaganda<\/span><\/a>\u201d) indicates this is a\u00a0notion sadly worth repeating.<\/span><\/p>\n Song\u2019s vision of New York mirrors her vision of romantic love: it\u2019s all struggle and hope, with dreams dashed repeatedly but not abandoned. It\u2019s sometimes clumsily communicated but there\u2019s something affecting about the reminder that it\u2019s all worth the risk, or maybe it\u2019s just that this writer has attended four weddings this summer.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nGet more Little White\u00a0Lies<\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n