Modern dating, experts have lamented, has become a numbers game; the more matches you make, the more likely you are to land a mate. But in the new film Materialists, the only number that really matters is a suitor’s net worth. Take Harry (played by Pedro Pascal), for example: He’s a partner in a private-equity firm and the owner of a $12 million penthouse apartment in Manhattan. John (Chris Evans), meanwhile, lives paycheck to paycheck as an aspiring actor and part-time cater waiter who splits his rent with roommates. Between the two of them, Harry’s the obvious “unicorn”—the most desirable kind of bachelor, according to Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a professional matchmaker and the film’s protagonist. Lucy sees dating as a marketplace of potential spouses whose worth is determined by their income as much as their looks. Never mind their interests or how they’d treat a partner; a guy like Harry is inherently more valuable than someone like John.
专家感叹现代约会已成为数字游戏。您的比赛越多，您就越有可能吸引伴侣。但是在新的电影《唯物主义者》中，唯一真正重要的数字是求婚者的净资产。以哈里（由佩德罗·帕斯卡（Pedro Pascal）饰演），例如：他是一家私募股权公司的合伙人，也是曼哈顿一间耗资1200万美元的顶层公寓的所有者。同时，约翰（克里斯·埃文斯（Chris Evans））将薪水付给了薪水，作为有抱负的演员和兼职餐饮服务员，他们与室友分配了租金。在他们两个之间，哈利是显而易见的“独角兽”，这是最可取的单身汉。露西认为约会是潜在配偶的市场，其价值由他们的收入和外观一样多。不要介意他们的兴趣或如何对待伴侣；像哈利这样的人本质上比像约翰这样的人更有价值。
Lucy isn’t heartless. Rather, she sees herself as pragmatic about modern romance. Materialists, the writer-director Celine Song’s follow-up to her sensitive Oscar-nominated feature, Past Lives, tracks Lucy as she finds matches for her clients, many of whom also think about future partners as commodities. The men tell her that they want women under a certain BMI and age; the women want men above a certain height and tax bracket. As amused as she might sometimes be by their demands, Lucy promises to introduce them to their “grave buddy.” To her, finding love should be easy—it’s just math, she likes to say—yet Lucy’s own love life has remained stagnant. She asserts to anyone who asks that she’ll either marry rich or die alone.
露西不是无情的。相反，她认为自己是现代浪漫史的务实。唯物主义者，作家导演席琳·宋（Celine Song）对她敏感的奥斯卡提名功能的后续作品《前世》追踪了露西（Lucy）为客户找到比赛时，他们中的许多人也认为未来的合作伙伴是商品。男人告诉她，他们希望女人在某个BMI和年龄下。女人希望男人高于一定身高和税收范围。露西（Lucy）有时会因他们的要求而感到高兴，但露西承诺将他们介绍给他们的“严重伙伴”。对她来说，找到爱应该很容易 - 只是数学，她喜欢说 - 露西自己的爱情生活一直停滞不前。她向任何要求她嫁给有钱人或独自死亡的人断言。
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This being a romantic dramedy, Lucy ends up in something of a love triangle anyway: She falls for Harry while harboring a lingering affection for John, who happens to be her ex. But her predicament isn’t really about which suitor she’ll choose; instead, she’s caught between two versions of herself—the cash-strapped idealist who once pursued acting alongside John, and the polished working girl she’s become. The core conflict of Materialists is similar to that of Past Lives, yet Song renders it less successfully here. Lucy’s journey takes too many cynical turns to be satisfying, and the film’s ideas are too scattershot to be convincing. Materialists falters most when it tries to mesh its competing aims: to deliver a throwback love story while also deconstructing the reality of modern dating. Instead, in the end, the film resembles the very world it tries to critique, offering a litany of observations about finding The One without ever substantially arguing for any of them.
这是一个浪漫的戏剧性，无论如何，露西最终都陷入了一个三角恋：她屈服于哈利，同时怀有对约翰的挥之不去的感情，约翰恰好是她的前任。但是她的困境并不是她会选择哪个求婚者。取而代之的是，她在两个版本之间被抓住了 - 曾经与约翰一起追求表演的现金短缺的理想主义者以及她成为的抛光工作女孩。唯物主义者的核心冲突类似于过去的生活，但歌曲在这里的成功率不大。露西的旅程需要太多的愤世嫉俗的转变，无法令人满意，这部电影的想法太分散了，无法令人信服。唯物主义者在试图隔离竞争的目的时，最大的动摇了：提供一个回头的爱情故事，同时也解构了现代约会的现实。取而代之的是，最后，这部电影类似于它试图批评的世界，提供了一系列关于找到一部批评的观察，而没有实质性地争论其中的任何一部。
The film’s glossy veneer of confidence, much like that of its lead, belies an uncertainty. Apart from some punchy dialogue probing the economy of marriage, its tale is shallow, with almost nonexistent stakes. John and Harry pose little challenge to Lucy’s notions about partners needing to check each other’s superficial boxes; both are handsome and smitten with her, and the disparity in their wealth never presents much of an obstacle for Lucy either. She had taken issue with John’s poverty when they were together, as shown in a clunkily inserted flashback, but his finances are a mere asterisk to their present-day dynamic.
这部电影的充满信心的饰面，就像它的主角一样，掩盖了不确定性。除了一些有力的对话探讨婚姻的经济外，它的故事是浅薄的，几乎不存在。约翰和哈利对露西的观念对伙伴的观念提出了很少的挑战，他们需要检查彼此的肤浅盒子。两者都很帅气，对她迷住了，他们的财富差异也从未给露西带来很多障碍。正如约翰在一起时，她对约翰的贫穷感到不满，正如笨拙地插入的倒叙中所表明的那样，但他的财务状况仅仅是他们当今动态的星号。
Lucy is as thinly written as her suitors—a nod, maybe, to the threadbare profiles of app-fueled dating, but one that makes her a frustratingly inscrutable romantic lead. It doesn’t help that Johnson, whose flat affect can be an asset in enigmatic dramas such as The Lost Daughter, isn’t particularly believable as a woman with hang-ups about money. (If she’s the provenance behind “iPhone face” in the misguided Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, here she has what I call “property-portfolio face.”) The bigger problem, however, lies in Lucy’s inelegant transformation from a skeptic about love to a wholehearted believer in it. When her most persistent client, Sophie (Zoë Winters), is sexually assaulted on a date, Sophie alternates between being furious at and grateful for Lucy, leaving the third act a confused mess. Although Winters captures Sophie’s despair, her character gets compressed into a plot point and her arc produces a jarring shift in mood. Lucy’s realization that she should, as Sophie advises her, treat her clients as more than “merchandise” rings hollow as a result.
露西（Lucy）像她的求婚者一样稀薄，也许是对应用程序策划约会的线索概况的点头，但使她成为令人沮丧的浪漫主义领导者。在像失落的女儿这样的神秘戏剧性中，他的平坦影响能成为一项资产的约翰逊并不是一个特别可信的约翰逊，因为他对金钱的挂断电话并不那么可信。（如果她是简·奥斯丁（Jane Austen）说服的Netflix改编中“ iPhone脸”背后的来源，那么她在这里拥有我所说的“财产 - 港口面孔”。）然而，更大的问题是露西（Lucy）从对爱情的危险人物转变为爱心的人的毫无意义的转变。当她最持久的客户索菲（ZoëWinters）在约会时遭到性侵犯时，索菲（Sophie）在对露西（Lucy）的愤怒和感激之中交替，使第三幕感到困惑。尽管温特斯（Winters）捕捉了索菲（Sophie）的绝望，但她的角色被压缩到一个情节中，而她的弧线会产生刺耳的情绪转变。露西（Lucy）意识到，正如索菲（Sophie）所建议的那样，她应该将她的客户视为“商品”，从而使客户更加空洞。
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Not to sound like someone still pining for an ex, but Materialists made me miss the work Song did in Past Lives. In that film, which followed a married woman yearning for the person she used to be after reconnecting with her childhood crush, Song used intimate specificity to unearth reflections about love—romantic, platonic, and otherwise. In Materialists, the director has essentially done the opposite: Her characters are mouthpieces for broad philosophies about connection, while their stories end up getting buried. The effect is a work that’s tonally at odds with itself. Though Materialists is similarly packed with insightful monologues, it’s heavy-handed in a way that Past Lives never was. Song bookends her latest with sappy scenes of prehistoric humans falling in love, and she injects flippancy into moments that call for sentimentality: When Lucy and Harry finally have a much-needed conversation, the script incorporates an absurd bit of physical comedy that undermines the poignancy of their heart-to-heart.
听起来并不像是一个仍在为前任钉住的人，但唯物主义者让我错过了这首歌在过去的生活中所做的。在那部电影中，一位已婚妇女向她渴望与童年时代重新建立联系的人的渴望，歌曲对巨大的，巨大的，柏拉图式的和其他人的反思进行了亲密的特殊性。在《唯物主义者》中，导演实质上做出了恰恰相反：她的角色是关于联系的广泛哲学的喉舌，而他们的故事最终被埋葬了。效果是一项与自身矛盾的作品。尽管唯物主义者同样充满了有见地的独白，但它以过去的生活从未有过的方式进行了沉重的方式。Song Bookend以史前人类坠入爱河的史上的狂热场景，将她的最新作品注入了狂热的时刻：当露西和哈里终于进行了急需的对话时，剧本融合了一场荒谬的剧本喜剧，破坏了他们内心深处的痛苦。
There’s much about Song’s movie that I enjoyed. The fizzy sequences of Lucy meeting one client after the next, inspired by the director’s own experience as a matchmaker, remind me of classics such as Broadcast News; they offer a glimpse into a gig that consumes a person whole. Besides, there’s a real pleasure in seeing Hollywood stars fall for each other. But in trying to both critique and poke fun at the costs of modern love, Materialists never coheres into an emotionally potent tale. To put it in Lucy’s terms: The film is beautiful and smart, and it clearly contains enough appeal to make it stand out in the marketplace. It’s just no unicorn.
我喜欢宋的电影很多。露西（Lucy）在下一个客户之后与一位客户会面的速度序列，受到导演自己作为媒人的经历的启发，使我想起了经典的广播新闻。他们瞥见了一个消耗一个人的演出。此外，看到好莱坞的明星彼此相处真是一种荣幸。但是，在试图以批评和嘲笑现代爱情的成本时，唯物主义者从来没有融入一个情感上有力的故事。用露西的话说：这部电影是美丽而聪明的，显然包含足够的吸引力，可以使其在市场上脱颖而出。只是不是独角兽。
