How much are you worth romantically?

Filmmaker Celine Song has thoughts on the modern dating scene

- KYLE BUCHANAN

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 favourite 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 romcom, Materialists, which stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a New York City matchmaker with an enviable track record of steering single women toward successful men. But when Lucy meets the handsome and rich Harry (Pedro Pascal), who'd prefer to woo Lucy instead of her clients, she must decide if the material things he can offer are more valuable than the deeper connection she feels with John (Chris Evans), her broke ex-boyfriend.

Song wrote the screenplay for Materialists in 2022 as she awaited the release of Past Lives, about a South Korean immigrant reunited with the childhood friend who still carries a torch for her. When I met Song last month over drinks at a West Hollywood hotel, she spoke candidly about love and longing as a creative through line in her work.

“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.”