Computer love: "Materialists"

Whether you embraced it or not (and I couldn't quite), Celine Song's much-admired breakthrough film Past Lives was a small, wispy affair, informed by palpably close personal experience, which dramatised nothing more nor less than people passing like ships in the night. Her follow-up Materialists has grander designs: here, Song intends to use the money and clout Past Lives made available to her to update the Sophisticated New York Romance and triangulate from her characters' uncertain movements Something Profound About Modern Love. Her three key players run into one another at a society wedding where the cake is taller than most of the invitees; they proceed from there to conversations in well-appointed, tastefully lit bars and restaurants. Dakota Johnson's Lucy is a pragmatic singleton and high-end matchmaker who thinks nothing of reducing her clients to a set of stats (age, height, takehome pay, etc.) Her head will be turned, however, by the Internet's favourite boyfriends, cast as suitors representing wildly different prospects. Pedro Pascal's Harry is a private equity player who offers something new and distinguished; statistically, he'd be a good match for anyone. Chris Evans' John, by marked contrast, is a jobbing actor and part-time waiter with whom Lucy has chemistry and - crucially - history, notably a brief fling our heroine terminated once it became apparent this bum had no money. As set-ups for romcoms go, this one feels more than most like an equation any smart writer-director would be keen to take a crack at balancing.

Clearly, Song's intention was to broaden her demographic by expanding out from the specificity Past Lives represented to something much more generalised. (You could watch all this summer's event movies and not see a more calculated endeavour.) The trouble with Materialists is that it proves a great deal more remote, too. The film opens with a 2001-like prologue in which we witness the wooing of cavedwellers, the idea presumably being to flag how we've complicated the processes of courtship over centuries of evolution. Yet despite being thousands of years detached in time from these first, fumbling lovers, I still felt closer to them than I did to the characters in the feature proper, who at almost every turn struck me as creatures from another planet entirely. It's not just the money involved, though that's certainly a part of it: amid a succession of set-ups that resemble advertorial features in our glossier Sunday supplements, Lucy and Harry are at one point seen to occupy a bed the size of an Arctic ice floe. It's how they act and, more specifically yet, how they talk: in the brittle, strident terms people use on social media. (They don't discuss, they discourse.) A24 are clearly generous backers with stuffed contact books, a dream for any emergent filmmaker trying to vault the ever-growing chasm between the indie fringes and the movie mainstream, but my God could they do with a more rigorous script editor, who might have struck out some of the hogwash and hooey in which Materialists trades. 

One pivotal plot point (people having their legs surgically broken and reset in order to gain inches in height) is evidently something Song has read about on the Internet and convinced herself is an actual thing regular folks are doing every day; I understand why she's worked in a sexual-assault subplot - to flag the dangers of modern mating - but it sits uneasily with the moneyed blandness that is the film's default setting. The film often seems as muddleheaded as its own characters, which is not as appealing as it sounds. What Materialists demonstrates more than anything is just how haywire our movie development processes have gone. Whether it's producers turning a blind eye to this nonsense in order to bask in the reflected glory that comes with backing a much-laurelled creative, or critics incessantly waving their pompoms for a brand, a director or their favourite stars, what we've been left with here is one of those sophomore features that only underlines the flaws in a semi-promising first film. Twice now, Song has presented us with characters and relationships that would only pass for credible when taken in isolation, in a screenwriter-engineered vacuum; hold them up to the harsh light of the real world, and they begin to melt away like vampires at sunrise. There probably still is a market for Materialists: with its chichi interiors and largely vibes-based performances, it's the kind of film that gets embraced by folks who want to pass as more sophisticated than they actually are. The cycles of discourse will be sustained, most likely in those same glossy Sunday supplements ("Meet the Real-Life Materialists!"), as if a film and a creative could have no higher aim. But - man alive - is all this exasperating to have to sit through: if this is modern movie love, and if this tepid vapidity is what the American independent sector has been reduced to, give me Matthew McConaughey leaning on Kate Hudson every damn time.

Materialists opens in cinemas nationwide today.