Thoughts on Materialists

     At the Angelika Film Centre this week, I went to see Materialists, a 2025 romantic film written and directed by Celine Song. The film centers on Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a failed actor who works as a successful agent at a matchmaking company, who has matched people leading to nine marriages, and sees love and romance as mathematical equations, matching people based on stats and similar backgrounds and levels of attractiveness and incomes and class status, and she herself wants to marry a rich man and be well-taken care. She makes an annual salary of $80K at her job, lives in a first floor apartment in Manhattan, and can easily pitch her services to people by offering it as a way to enhance their lives and customize partner matches for them.

    At the wedding of one of her matches, she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), the groom's brother, who comes from a wealthy family in finances, works in private equity, has a $12 million penthouse apartment, and is the perfect package, according to Lucy's standards. She calls him a "unicorn," saying that he is the kind of perfect match a client would hope to find, but wouldn't able to find someone who is rich, handsome, kind, stylish, all in one package, and settling for what is more attainable. She tries inviting Harry to have a membership at the matchmaking service, but he wants to date her. She refuses at first, saying she grew up poor (which is funny to hear, given Johnson comes from a Hollywood family going back two generations), is in her thirties and older than the typical early-twentysomething most older men want to date, that her looks will fade sooner than later, etc. But Harry is attracted to her, and they have a whirlwind romance, fulfilling her fantasies of being swept up by a rich man.

    But at the same time she meets Harry at the wedding, she runs into John (Chris Evans), who is working as a caterer there and continues to pursue acting. They end up reconnecting, and he still has lingering feelings for her, but she remembers that she broke up with him because she hated that he was poor and always broke, driving a rundown car, living in a grimy apartment with roommates, and still seemed immature well into adulthood. She felt guilty for resenting him for being poor, but that she herself wanted financial stability from a partner, not just earning her own income. John is 37, working catering jobs while acting in a play in a black box theater, and clearly outgrowing the messy chaos of living with roommates who don't wash the dishes or leave used condoms on the kitchen floor.

    When John learns that Lucy is dating Harry, he is polite about it, but does question Lucy about it, and it becomes more of a complicated love triangle between her feelings for Harry and John, of wanting money and financial security vs. being poor with someone with whom she has history.

    I was mixed on the movie. I appreciated that Song was exploring the mechanical feelings of dating and finding someone compatible based on stats and money, as well as superficial values on age and appearances, and there are funny montage scenes where Lucy is talking to potential clients who have rigid criteria for their dating preferences, and Lucy's quiet sarcasm (as Johnson charmingly displays in press interviews) is fun to watch, like when she goes off on someone who essentially wants the company to create a man from scratch based on her two page list of requirements, being like "I cannot build you a husband." Those scenes worked really well, and the film opens with a sweet prologue of early humans displaying courtship with flowers and the man placing a flower tied like a ring on the woman's finger. 

    Plus, the film had beautiful cinematography by Shabier Kirchner, who worked on Song's directorial debut Past Lives (2023) and Steve McQueen's five-part anthology series Small Axe (2020). I especially liked a dinner scene between Lucy and Harry where the camera is stationery and shows them in profile, having conversations in long takes, which created more quiet intimacy for the characters and the audience in that sequence.

    But I couldn't get invested in the characters themselves, because they felt empty to me. Johnson is charismatic and funny in interviews, but when she's doing the dramatic scenes, comes off as flat and wooden, and lacking romantic on-screen chemistry with either Pascal or Evans. Pascal looks lost in this film, even if he does get to have a good scene much later on that shows more hidden depth to his character beyond his wealthy appearances. And Evans looked mentally checked out during the romantic scenes, and I didn't find it believable with his Hollywood superhero looks that his character would be slumming it in a crappy apartment at 37 (nearly 45 in real life) with roommates, scrapping by to earn a living.

    I couldn't feel enough history between Lucy and John's backstory as a former couple to root for them to get back together, being unsure if they only broke up because of her class issues or if there were other mitigating factors. I also felt like her romance with Harry was more based in fantasy than reality, because I didn't feel like either of them got to know each other as real people, just being interested in each other for superficial reasons.

    I also got angry at a subplot that happens with a tertiary character, that I felt was completely unnecessary and cruel to the character, and while I got it was supposed to serve as a contrast to the romantic fantasy that Lucy was living with Harry, I was still mad that the movie took those directions, dumping it on a character who felt like Lucy was treating in a patronizing way, and their story got wrapped up way too quickly in a way that I felt was unrealistic.

    I preferred Past Lives because I felt more of a genuine connection and intimacy between the characters that I didn't feel in this, and I liked its quiet simplicity, which this film had in some parts, but lost when it went towards more Hollywood-type third act drama. I'm glad that Celine Song got a sophomore follow-up, and a wider audience, I just felt parts of this movie felt underdeveloped and could have been improved with better choices in screenwriting and casting.

Thoughts on The Swimmer

   On Criterion, I watched The Swimmer, a 1968 drama written and directed by Eleanor and Frank Perry, based on John Cheever's short story of the same name. The film starred Burt Lancaster as Ned Merrill, a middle-aged, fit, and wealthy advertising executive who lives in an affluent suburb in Connecticut, and he drops by a pool party held by old friends, wearing only a bathing suit, and having drinks with them. He's popular, with many rich friends, and skates through life, repeatedly referring to his daughters "playing tennis at home." He looks over the hilly area where his home is further south, and connects a "river" of swimming pools at his friends' homes that lead to his home, and decides he is going to swim his way home, walking barefoot in his bathing suit and taking swims in each pool. His friends think his plan is amusing, though they are also nursing hangovers from a party the night before, so they may not be thinking clearly.

    So Ned sets on his way, walking through the woods and dropping up unexpectedly at his friends' homes, and as he makes his odyssey home, the people he meets with are from his past, and reveal more about his character as being a shallow, cheap, snobby person. He sees Julie (Janet Landgard), a former babysitter who watched his kids, who is now a young woman of 20, and confesses that she had a crush on him as a teen, only for her crush to become more disillusioned when she briefly joins him on his journey. He stops by friends who are a nudist couple, who aren't bothered by his eccentricities but are put off by his posturing. He is condescending to the hired driver (Bernie Hamilton) of one of his friends, asking about where the previous driver Steve is, who the new driver doesn't know, and being oblivious to the new driver being put off by his classist attitude towards "the help."

    As his path home becomes increasingly grim, the film becomes more of an allegory about Ned living in a fantasy, refusing to accept realities of his true character or how people really see him, and Lancaster is excellent in starting off as a broad-chested, handsome man and becoming a broken shell of a person with his whole life shattered, having a psychotic break with reality. 

    This film was excellent, feeling like a horror film without being classified as one, because it's about an entitled upper-class man having a crisis where, beyond his sunny demeanor, all of his ugliness comes to light, and especially pointed out by people he's hurt and stepped on (especially in an excellent scene with Janice Rule as his former mistress), until he looks like a loser standing in the rain in just his bathing suit, a complex performance of vulnerability by a symbol of machismo like Burt Lancaster, known for noir films and tough guy roles.

    I had heard of this film from the podcast Critically Acclaimed Network, where the hosts were each giving their top ten list of the best 24-hour movies in an episode from last year, and thought it sounded really interesting, and I'm glad I watched it, it was a great movie.

Thoughts on Bring Her Back

   Last week, I saw the 2025 Australian supernatural horror film Bring Her Back, directed by Danny and Michael Philippou and written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman. The film focuses on step-siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong), who are placed in foster care after finding their father dead in the shower. Andy is a few months away from turning 18, and wants to apply for guardianship of Piper, who is also visually impaired. They don't want to be split up in the foster care system, so they are placed in the care of Laura (Sally Hawkins), a former counselor whose daughter Cathy (who also was visually impaired) recently passed away, so she is excited to take care of Piper, seeing her as a surrogate daughter, and showing much more favoritism towards her than to Andy, who she views as a troublemaker. Laura is also taking care of her mute foster child Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who keeps acting out in disturbing ways and is a threat to the pet cat (and thankfully no actual harm comes to the cat during the movie).

    Laura is all smiles and cheeriness, playing up that kind of positivity that Hawkins portrayed in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, but views Andy as a threat, who sees more red flags going on than Piper is aware of. She goes through his phone messages, she makes him kiss his father's corpse at his funeral, she blames him if Oliver gets out of his room and destroys things, and she manipulates things to make Andy seem dangerous to get rid of him and have Piper to herself. Andy is determined to protect Piper from Laura's danger, and keeps trying to reach out to authorities for help, but Laura keeps finding ways to swing things back around to her favor.

    Sally Hawkins is fantastic in this film, and is great at playing up the manipulative personality of a woman who is grieving the loss of her daughter, and going to extremes to want to "bring her back," which includes conducting occult practices, as seen in VHS found footage tapes of demonic cult rituals. Laura also takes advantage of Piper's disability, lying to her about her surroundings whenever there is anything disturbing, since she can see blurry shapes and colors but not definite images like a sighted person can.

    Andy is torn between grieving the loss of his father, while also remembering his father as abusive towards him, but affectionate towards Piper, so Piper has a more loving memory of him than he did, and having nightmare flashbacks of his father when he's in the shower, reliving the trauma of finding him dead there.

    The child actors excel in this film, especially with Phillips playing a disturbed child, in difficult scenes where he is performing twisted acts, especially a scene involving a knife, so hopefully he was well taken care of while filming horror scenes like that. Wong shines more in the last third of the film, as she as Piper becomes more aware of Laura's nature, and having to defend herself while being visually impaired, which makes for some really suspenseful scenes. And Barratt holds the film together with a lot of vulnerability as Andy, as a traumatized kid on the brink of adulthood struggling with grief while trying to protect his sister from danger.

    There's a lot of dread in the film, and a frequent use of water as a threat, like the empty swimming pool filling up with rainwater, hearing rain tapping outside, the isolated feeling of Laura's home, and the loneliness while the main characters are all grieving in their own ways.

    I really liked this film, and found it interesting in being about grief and focusing more so on character studies. I wasn't as into the demonic cult stuff, especially if it got too gory, but the film was held together by solid acting performances and a bleak narrative that was compelling to watch.

Thoughts on Jane Austen Wrecked My Life

     Yesterday, I went to the Angelika Film Center and saw Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a 2024 French romantic comedy written and directed by Laura Piani. The film stars Camille Rutherford as Agathe, a young Parisian woman who works at Shakespeare & Company with her best friend Félix (Pablo Pauly). She lives with her sister and her six-year-old nephew, and is struggling with trauma since her parents were killed in an automobile accident in which she was injured. She takes her bicycle everywhere and is afraid to get in cars. She is told by her writing teacher not to write "cheap romances" anymore and to get out of her comfort zone, but when she's drinking sake in a Chinese restaurant, she imagines a man's face at the bottom of her cup and fantasizes about him, inspiring her to write romances. She has confused, unrequited feelings for Félix, who is a casual player in dating, and she hasn't had sex in two years. She isn't into the dating app culture or swiping, and is lonely and pines for more of a romantic connection.

    Her sister tells her she needs to break out of her funk and get out of her head. Then, she gets an invite in the mail to the Jane Austen Residency in England, a two-week writing retreat. Félix, knowing that she adores Austen and identifies with Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion (for being an old maid), secretly sent her work to them and got her accepted. She reluctantly goes, taking the Channel ferry across from Paris to London, and she kisses Félix and departs.

    At the ferry's terminal in England, she is picked up by Oliver (Charlie Anson), a distant descendant of Jane Austen, who is not a fan of her work, and takes her to the retreat in a mansion, hosted by his elderly parents. There, she meets the other writers, and struggles with writer's block, and over the course of the time, struggles with her romantic feelings towards Félix and later Oliver, who starts off seeming arrogant but opens up more to Agathe about his personal struggles.

    I really enjoyed this film. I liked how it was mostly about a woman struggling with her creative process as a writer, dealing with trauma from her past, and learning how to get out of her writer's block to be an artist and let go. I wasn't as into the love triangle parts, finding it predictable as who she would end up with, but it's a romantic comedy, so I knew that would be a part of it going in. 

    Rutherford is really lovely and charming as a lead, with romantic dark brown curls, and is French-British in real life and fluent in French and English, as is her character, and the film is written so that the majority of characters are bilingual in both languages, easily switching between both languages whenever they want. I really enjoyed her connection with Oliver's mom Beth (Liz Crowther), an old English woman speaking to her in French and being very hospitable and sweet, and encouraging her in her talents and passion as a writer. I also liked when she developed friendships with two other women (Annabelle Lengronne; Lola Peprow) at the residency, of them being supportive of each other and going out to a bar to sing and get drunk and have fun. In the film opening, there's a fun scene of Agathe in the bookstore singing along to the song "Cry to Me" by Solomon Burke, and it's really adorable and cute.

    I thought this was a really nice movie, a sweet bilingual romantic comedy, and I'm happy I checked it out.