Movies rely on love. It’s the constant, from Agnes Ayres swooning over Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik to Han and Leia’s barbed flirtations. But movies about love, where eros is the text? For the last few decades it’s been rom-coms or nothing.
Materialists, the second film from Past Lives director Celine Song, is that rare modern movie in which love is studied through the lens of drama and character. It’s done not through grand romantic acts but through conversation. Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a New York matchmaker, getting her clients to fill out forms for what they want. When she meets venture capitalist Harry (Pedro Pascal), he ticks all her boxes, and their dates become philosophical discissions about the transactional nature of relationships. The same cannot be said of her interactions with John (Chris Evans), her longtime ex whose acting career never took off.
In the conversations between Lucy and Harry, it seems there are traces of Verfremdungseffekt, or the alienation effect, most commonly associated with the mid-twentieth century German playwright Bertolt Brecht …
“I’m such a Brechthead!” Song gasps. “That’s why I did theatre, because of Bertolt Brecht!”
Well before Deadpool cracked wise beyond the screen, Brecht was experimenting with direct conversation with the audience, with exposition that explained minutiae of the characters rather than leaving it all to the audience. His purpose was to force the viewer to question the stances and beliefs of the characters rather than simply associate or empathize with them. However, the term Verfremdungseffekt really doesn’t have a clear translation in English, and for Song the alienation or distancing is ultimately about bringing the audience closer to the meaning of the story.
“Part of that is that you as an audience member get to feel as yourself, and what that does is that you get to bring your own life with you. If you’re sitting there, watching a character stare at you, then you’re going to be confronted with, ‘Is this a mirror?’”
There’s a memorable scene in Brecht’s 1948 play, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in which Azdak, the scrivener of a small village, teaches a noble in hiding how to eat like a poor man. It’s hard not to see resonances of that didactic exchange in Harry and John’s ideas of a date: a seemingly endless number of high-end sushi places versus chicken over rice in the park. Brecht described himself as anti-capitalist, Song notes, “and part of that is about the materialism of it. As in, it’s about the way we live, and the way that everybody lives and breathes and talks to each other is going to be built into the marketplace that we all live in – the marketplace we call the world.”
As much as Materialists is about love, it’s also about class. Song says, “If you’re born rich and you’re still rich, that’s a very different person to someone who’s working class who’s working towards middle class, or middle class working towards upper middle class.” Like Brecht’s scene of how the way rich and poor eat differently, the class differences between John and Harry are ingrained “in their behavior and the way that they work, the way that their emotions work. So much of that is going to be built into their material reality.” Song explains that she had worked with her actors about how their social position is reflected in matters as simple and pivotal as the space they take up. “[John is] hunched over, and he’s often on the ground [but] Harry, he glides. He glides through space because he’s always belonged there, but John, there are many places he’s supposed to be invisible.”
The class division between John and Harry is the source of much of Lucy’s internal conflict. Like John, she comes from a working-class background but “she’s aspirational,” Song says. Just as she is often selling the dream of financial stability to her clients, her day-to-day existence becomes about “the performance of wealth, of being like, ‘OK, I’ll save up for that one thing so I can wear that.’”
“[Brecht’s] big quote was, ‘A play should be like a boxing match.’ The audience should be that passionate, that alive and involved.”
That’s another Brechtian element of Materialists. Many of his plays come across on the page as cerebral, maybe even a little dry and academic. But Brecht wasn’t writing for small, cultured, academic audiences, and he grasped the value of scale, spectacle, and approachability, even dabbling in musicals (The Threepenny Opera), adaptations of classics (Don Juan, The Duchess of Malfi), farce (Driving Out the Devil), plucked-from-the-headlines drama (Lindbergh’s Flight) and even gangster flicks (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui) to broach complex questions for a general audience.
Brecht knew he was giving a performance, not a lecture. In similar fashion, Materialists sees Song growing dramatically as a director, something she credits to the process of making Past Lives. “I had such a perfect experience making my debut film, and when it comes to the next film I’m bringing so much experience and knowledge as a filmmaker.”
In Materialists, she plays much more with visual techniques like depth of field and subtly repeated imagery, and also with sound. There’s an early scene in which Lucy is shepherded into a room by a small swarm of bridesmaids, all in the same expensive dress, all with the expensive high heels making the same staccato click-click-click on the very expensive marble floor of the absurdly pricy wedding venue. Song explains, “Those footsteps, how loud and how they move through the space, that’s going to tell the story of the whole thing, and it’s either going to be hilarious or it’s not going to have the same impact.” Building the sound became increasingly important, with conversations with editor Keith Fraase dominating the editing process. Song says, “Sound tells story in a way that is totally imperceptible but is the most powerful thing. People may not recognize how sound is manipulating the story, but that’s really where so much of the story gets told.”
For Song, that’s a reminder that a film is constructed from disparate elements that must finally come together. She says, “On set, you’re Doctor Frankenstein. On set, you’re making tiny different body parts, every day. Every day, we shoot a scene, it’s a little body part. Sometimes it’s a hand, sometimes it’s an arm. In postproduction, you are sewing every single body part that you have and you’re turning them into a beautiful person. You want the sewing to be invisible, and you want the movie to walk and live and breathe in a way that’s so effortless that it feels like it has a mother. Then this movie is hopefully going to inspire love in the audience in a way that it’s put together.”
Materialists is in theatres now from A24 Films. Find our review and showtimes here.
This article appears in June 13 • 2025.
