MATCH ME IF YOU CAN

“Materialists.”

- BY JUSTIN CHANG

The work of the Korean Canadian filmmaker Celine Song is modest in scope and intimate in feel, but listen closely to her words—to say nothing of her silences—and you will hear whispers of a grand, even cosmic, ambition. “Past Lives,” her début feature, from 2023, was a small-scaled yet breathtakingly expansive tale of cultural and romantic confusion. The story skipped across countries and decades, leaping fluidly through time—twenty-four years backward, twelve years forward, and so on—with a quiet confidence in the bigger picture. The three main characters, modelled on Song, her husband, and her childhood sweetheart, spoke of the Buddhist-derived concept of inyeon, which posits that love is not only fated but also perfected across centuries, through endless cycles of rebirth.

Now Song has written and directed a new film, “Materialists,” and it is, like “Past Lives,” a triangle without a villain. Nobody plots against anyone, but nobody invokes ancient proverbs, either. It unfolds in present-day New York, although there are two bookending scenes, set in prehistoric times, in which we see two cave dwellers embarking on an early human romance. Love, the film suggests, has always been a strategic, material affair, a matter of skillful hunting and gathering. Your ears perk up when, about forty minutes (and tens of thousands of years) later, one character admonishes another: “You say you think I’m smart, but you're talking to me like I’m a caveman.” Coincidence? In Song’s movies, there’s no such thing.