Words are actions, as anyone know has already been informed “I do” or “you are dismissed”. However, after almost a century of talking images, most directors do not represent speaking as vigorously or imaginatively that they carry out physical action. Most of the work is generally left to distribution: the routine version of a film involves photos of acting actors, such as audiovisual fragments of parts. This may explain why some of the most interesting approaches to speak in the films came from directors who started as playwrights and therefore, when they turn their attention to the screen, are very aware of the differences – whether the Sacha or Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Kenneth Longan guitar. Add another to the list: Céline Song, whose second feature film, “Matimes”, marks a major artistic advance on her start, “Past Lives”. The two films offer such a generous dialogue, but the previous one offered a much less distinctive approach to the scenario and filming; The news, at its best, displays a surprising inspiration not only in writing Song’s dialogue, but also in the way it provides this dialogue with a cinematographic identity.
The triangular configuration of “materialists” is similar to that of “past lives”. In the two films, the romantic relationship of a woman with a man is shaded by the arrival of a man with whom she had been involved before. “Matimes” features Dakota Johnson in the role of Lucy Mason, a professional contribution to Manhattan who, during the wedding of a client, meets the groom’s brother, Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal), a rich partner in the family in the family of his family. She wants it as a customer; He asked her for an appointment. She agrees to go out with Harry, then they start a romance. But, during marriage, she also meets her ex-little friend John Pitts (Chris Evans), an actor in difficulty who works as a military milking server. Lucy delights a friendship with John – and, when she faces a crisis at work (more about it later), she confides not in Harry but in John, a choice that, rather than causing trouble, simply reflects it.
What is most striking in “materialists” – and what quickly distinguishes it not only from “past lives”, but from the general series of romantic films, whether dramas or comedies (and “materialists” are part of the two categories, worried) – is a matter. Song has formerly worked as a contribution, and it shows, in the best way: the film feels built on the solid field of knowledge: Lucy knows what she is talking about, and Song knows what Lucy’s not talk about. Lucy has a flair to discuss her work, frankly and thought, both when she sells her services and when she describes him to knowledge – and the porous border between these two modes makes psychological twists and turns. Very early on, Lucy speaks with several other wedding guests on matchmaking and the big subject who underpins him – likes – while Harry is alone, close enough to hear but far enough to be discreet. While listening, it is as if notes of music floated through the room, the cartoon style, from Lucy’s mouth to Harry’s ears. He falls in love with his thoughts before meeting her. When he sees her sit alone at the so-called single table, he finds her space card and places it next to his. They quickly struck, his suavity and his counteracting franchise occurring in a dashing dialogue. They have such verbal chemistry that they dance practically already together while sitting.
Lucy is a former actress, and her capacities and her discipline as a interpreter are the key to her successes at work and the impression she makes on Harry – in fact, on anyone. She has a controlled physical rolling, can read people on site and is able to improvise the right sale argument or conversational gambit as a result. How much does Lucy believe in his own Spiel? Is she a persuasive saleswoman because she makes a good show with a clear idea of what will work, or because she talks about the heart and believes in the service she sells and the way he works? It is never clear – because Song barely shows who is outside his profession – but for about half of the film, Lucy’s performance is exciting. The ease with which she lets herself slip into the claws of her own rhetoric and become, with Harry, her own customer is dramatically dizzying.
When Lucy talks about matchmaking, she skillfully translates the emotional fantasy of romance into concepts and commercial terms, which makes Love’s ineffable mysteries seems accessible by striking practices that can be detailed on a spreadsheet. This dualism permeates his arguments of sale with high eyes and starred eyes with a philosophical heft of a very particular type, which the French writer Stendhal expressed aphistically: “A banker who made a fortune has a trait of a person necessary to make discoveries in philosophy, which means to see clearly in what is.” His personality could almost have been deliberately designed to unlock the Harry heart safe. There is a wonderful moment when, answering Lucy’s net questions about their relationship, Harry declares that she is the kind of woman he is looking for – “someone who understands the game, how the world works” and “someone who knows more” than him.
The aesthetic distillation of the song of these complexities and puzzles in the “materialists” is magnificent. His dialogue has a laconic but high slide and a dialectic pugnacious that recalls comedies with respect to the classic era, in which romance is often inseparable from tight sireaux. Even more important, it develops an aesthetic of the image and performance to embody the ideas of Tourbillon and the emotions of the roller coasters that the dialogue evokes. The many scenes in which Lucy is verbally displayed with a man or another are filmed with a delicate and breathless balance, as if the characters were partners in Acrobatics of Delight and Danger. (The director of photography, Shabier Kirchner, brings a clarity to wide -eyed and a wonder to the procedure.) The most original and unusual of all is the kind of tense immobility with which the song confuses the actors. At many crucial moments (including in the first dates of Lucy and Harry), this immobilization is established with the natural cooling of self -control and professionalism, then turns into a artifice close to the eculpte. (In this way, access winks and leave the classic-hollywood styles.) In such scenes, song films dialogue and define text as if it was operational, to orchestral accompaniment of images.
This invention triangle in text, image and performance raises “materialists” at a high level of aesthetic delight – for about half of the film. Then the film falls with a thud, so that never gets up again. The fault lies in a sudden secondary intrigue, involving the sexual assault of one client by another, which plunges history into a simple dramaturgical mechanism. It is not just that there is something roughly intrusive in the occasional use of the horrible incident as a simple point of the plot; Worse, the episode is a mask hiding an imaginative white, a gigantic distraction which diverts attention from a crucial affair to which the film seems to lead but then leaves untreated: character. Lucy and Harry spend a lot of time together (largely in her sumptuous Tribeca penthouse), but, in all appearances, they barely get to know each other. John, returning to Lucy’s life, does not seem curious about him either; He simply aims, mocking and mocking, to his rational state of mind and verified by boxes. In no relationship, there is no sense of what affinities and differences are at stake or why it counts, as Lucy tries to choose between the two men.
Song rightly discerns the exact moment when history requires crucial change. But the tour which is necessary – the one who could show who the characters are behind their dialectical facades – is not the one who comes. The characters do not discuss their love life, their religion, their interests – music, art, literature. Harry has a large shelf in the wall filled with coffee table books (and Lucy is there in front); were they chosen by a decorator; He reads; What does he read? She does not ask him or talk about her own tastes. What do one of the characters do for pleasure and with passion? Where did they grow up? Who are their friends? Lucy entrusts her work crisis to John, but who would have said if they had not reconnected?
There is another elision in the “materialists” which is extraordinary in a history on love, character and the rational and irrational aspects of romance; Namely, sex. I do not mean the representation of sex; Classical Hollywood films have never represented sex but were often filled, by suggestion. The “materialists” are almost as virgin as a film for children; A few moments of heavy kisses and kissing serve as medico-legal evidence that a relationship has become physical, but there is no sexual tension. The script raises doubts about the power of the reason to make deeply rooted matches, but there is nothing on the screen to suggest the wild irrationality of desire and pleasure.
These avoidance of personality marks are almost identical to the whites which leave the previous characteristic of Song, “Past Lives”, Insubstantial. But, in this film, the professional life of the protagonist also remained a figure; The dialogue has never exceeded the dramatic requirements of the moment, and Song’s management generally felt as if it were protecting and presented its script rather than transforming it. The “materialists”, on the other hand, offer an exciting fullness of verbal incident and cinematographic style – for a semi -film. This half connects the film to modern classics such as “Margaret” by Lonergan and some of the main independent films of the century. The business is at the heart of Mumbecore, as in most of the films of Andrew Bujalski, such as “Beeswax”, “results” and “girl support”; As in “Hannah Take the Stirs” by Joe Swanberg “and his series” Easy “; And as in the series of Lena Dunham “Girls” and her film “Tiny Furniture”. This generation of filmmakers, with their cowardly aesthetics and their free approach to the scripts, also adopted a complete spectrum approach to cultural life, and a frank candidacy for sex. Song, whose relationship with classical cinema is stronger than theirs, borrows and reuses its styles and its way, but rather than unravel to reinvent and extend its possibilities according to the possibilities of modern times, it reproduces and even strengthens its escapes and its silences. The “materialists” remain, for better and worse, all the business. ♦
