Kyle Buchanan, How Much Are You Worth Romantically? This Director Has Thoughts. NYTimes, June 13, 2025.
In her 20s, long before she wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated “Past Lives,” Celine Song spent six months working as a matchmaker in New York. By day, she’d meet with single women rattling off requirements for a potential mate, from appearance and height to income. By night, over beers with her artist friends, she couldn’t help but notice a disconnect: Many of her favorite people would be instantly rejected based on those criteria.
“I’d be like, ‘You guys would be not good mates for any of my clients,’” she said. “I spent all day listening to these women describe them as worthless people they do not want to meet, even though I ascribe so much worth to them because they are creative and brilliant and amazing.”
That tension lies at the heart of Song’s new rom-com, “Materialists,” which stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a New York City matchmaker with an enviable track record of steering single women toward successful men.
Love is a mystery:
“When I talk to people who are really, really smart, who seem to know everything, if you start asking them about their romantic life, everything falls apart,” she said. “They’ll just admit that they don’t know things about love, or they’ll be like, ‘I don’t know, she makes me feel like a kid.’ They’ll say things that are not becoming of the put-together, intelligent people they are, because love is a mystery.”
“When I talk to people who are really, really smart, who seem to know everything, if you start asking them about their romantic life, everything falls apart,” she said. “They’ll just admit that they don’t know things about love, or they’ll be like, ‘I don’t know, she makes me feel like a kid.’ They’ll say things that are not becoming of the put-together, intelligent people they are, because love is a mystery.”
From the interview itself:
Value is a big theme in “Materialists.” You really boil it down: People want a mate who makes them feel like a more valuable commodity.
Oh, yeah. And part of the frustration is, “With everything else, I can get the higher version because I can pay for it. So why not my partner?” You can upgrade a car, you can renovate a home, but people are people and they’re going to show up as they are. It’s a complete mystery why you’re going to connect with somebody.
And I feel like people reject mystery these days.
That’s what I was so interested in with this. Of course, the movie has a relationship to movies in the ’80s and ’90s, those romantic films from Nora Ephron and [James L.] Brooks. But I do think that the movie is so interested in what’s going on right now with us spiritually and romantically. Like, you might be 5-4. Why does your boyfriend need to be 6 feet tall? [...]
Though that’s always been true, it does feel like right now, we’re in a more presentational era than ever before.
Of course. This is why the language around going to the gym, self-improvement, there’s so much language about enhancing your value. We’re all just trying to develop our product, and you’re the product, right? And hopefully, you can develop your product to such a high value that you’re going to then maybe land a mate of another value.
The importance of the rom-com:
I respect it so much because it’s a genre where every single person can walk into it and feel connected. You must relate because love is a drama that you are in. You cannot go through life without any relationship to love whatsoever.
Many of our biggest actresses now, like Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone, don’t typically make romantic comedies.
Think about the superstar actresses of that time where romantic comedies ruled, like Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock. They themselves had power alone — it didn’t matter who the male leads were, the audience would show up for it. [The decline of romantic comedies] is also diminishing the role of an actress.
So why do you think that genre has fallen on hard times?
You have to be stupid to be in love. That’s very difficult, and it exasperates even the smartest people. Of course it exasperates some very smart filmmakers. [...]
Love as adventure:
Where do you think that interest comes from, if you had to drill down?
I think I got addicted to the feeling of going deep with someone. Once you’ve been there, why would you ever have any experience that is not that deep? You want to live on the edge and feel connected as much as you can, and there is a very funny fearlessness about it: You’re like, “Oh, it hurts, I cried all night,” but there’s kind of a fun to it, right? [...]
Some people do treat love as a math problem to be solved. But can you really control something so mysterious?
It’s a very good question. Every day you’re jumping off a cliff when you’re with someone. You’re deciding, “I’m going to tell you that I’m going to love you today and tomorrow I’m going to tell you I’m going to love you again.” At the end of it, you’re going to be on your deathbed and the fantasy is that you’re going to look at that person and you’ll be like, “Wow, I can’t believe it, but we still love each other.”
I’m reminded of one of my favorite rom-coms, Romancing the Stone. It’s about a romance writer, played by Kathleen Turner, who ends up in a Latin American jungle with bird smuggler, played by Michael Douglas, and together they go chasing after a large and mysterious emerald.
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