Lost art of the Hollywood romance

'Materialists' shows yet again that American cinema has lost the pulse of modern romance

- Uday Bhatia

"Are we in the right film?" a girl in the row behind me asked her friend. You could see why she'd be confused. They'd turned up for a New York romance with Pedro Pascal, and here was an unkempt man wearing animal hide handing a bouquet to a woman in front of a cave. He puts a ring fashioned out of a single flower on her finger. The title drops, and then we're in New York, watching Lucy (Dakota Johnson) get ready for another day as an in-demand matchmaker.

The opening of Materialists yearns to be the deer in the snow in Ildikó Enyedi's Finnish film On Body and Soul (2017). But this is an American film, so poetic animal metaphors are out. The question remains: why does Celine Song's film—which insists throughout that marriage is a business deal—begin with an Edenic scene of a man and woman in love? We have to wait till the last five minutes to learn they're a dream Lucy had of the first people who decided to marry. It's funny enough with Johnson's uninflected voiceover, even more incongruous that the film's idea of cave people is 'average Middle Eastern farmer'.

After they meet at a client's wedding, Lucy is steadily pursued by the groom's brother, financier Harry (Pedro Pascal), even as her actor ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans) shuffles unhappily in the background. The romance with Harry peaks over dinner at a swanky restaurant. If you played the scene on mute, you'd think Pascal and Johnson were trading