Materialists: The romantic comedy and its mother who gave birth to it (****)

Of all film genres, the romantic comedy is the most reviled, the most dangerous, the most sexist, the most idiotic, and, for all the above, one of the most enjoyable because it's simply unbearable. Yes, let's face it, a pleasure is much more pleasurable if, in addition, it's a mortal sin. The trick, so to speak, is the degree of involvement. It's about admitting the lie, accepting the rules of the game (it's nothing more than that), and allowing yourself to be fooled. Let's say that of all the cinematic genres, the romcom (short for "romantic comedy") is the most aware of the deception it embodies, represents, and narrates. And, despite or because of this, its entire value and meaning lies in its ability to convince us that what happens on screen should be true. It's not so much the formulation of a desire, which is also true, as the representation of the very faculty of desire, of desire itself. In any other type of film, the deception is evident and seems to be used as a balm by the viewer. No one who watches a comedy or a horror film ever completely believes it. It would be too embarrassing or too unbearable. In romantic comedy, however, the mechanism of identification is everything. You have to believe it, even though you know it's not true. And so on.

The Materialist is a romantic comedy, although in truth it would be more accurate to call it a meta-romantic comedy. That is to say, Celine Song's new film is, strictly speaking, a romantic comedy about the very possibility of romanticism, or, more accurately, about the possibility of romantic comedy as a genre today, when we already know, as we recently heard Blanca Lacasa say, that Pretty Woman is, in fact, a horror film. The grace, meaning, and timeliness of the film by the Canadian director of Korean origin basically consists in reducing to absurdity the rules that have governed rom-coms even before Hugh Grant started babbling singles jokes. And from there—from the shared acceptance that romantic love is nothing more than the most clumsy, cruel, and pernicious invention of the cheap, cheesy, and rancid patriarchy that, literally, gave birth to us— The Materialist proposes an incredible fairy tale that, in truth, is nothing more than the exaltation of, indeed, romantic comedy itself. It loses a bit of it and takes away from the emotionality (the pillar of all this) of the brilliance of the approach itself, but it's there.

The film, to the surprise of the audience, literally begins in prehistory. There, a woman and a man, both hairy, love each other. And they do so as best they can. That is, in a brutal way, unaware that to love each other, you must have first read Romeo and Juliet or watched The Philadelphia Story or My Best Friend's Wedding a thousand times. We then jump to a present-day filled with Marvel stars (Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans) in which a professional matchmaker (also known as a matchmaker ) experiences firsthand the rigors of her profession. She, who knows perfectly well that pairing off is strictly a financial matter, is astounded to find that things are not as straightforward as they seem. Be careful, the film is not a doctoral thesis. It is, as has been said, a romantic comedy, and therefore, it involves admitting the lie of everything, absolutely everything.

The virtue of the new offering from the director of the superb, beautiful, and precise "Past Lives " lies in laying everything out in the open. In explaining with grace, wit, and a sense of fate that everything we thought was love is nothing more than another Excel tool, and yet there's something that escapes the dial. We don't know what, or why, or even what for, but there is something. And that something retains enough unpredictability, doubt, and suspicion to be, at the very least, interesting. Yes, we no longer talk about love as exaltation but rather as consolation, but—and here's the crux of the matter—we're still talking about it.

It's true that Song ends up being dazzled by her own premise to the point of making such basic issues as plausibility or, as we've already said, emotion suffer. At times, it seems as if the director doesn't quite believe what she's telling. But, on the other hand, and here we really have no choice but to be enthusiastic, Materialists moves across the screen with a strange and profound lightness somewhere between naive and somewhat poisonous, capable of shaking the firmest convictions, whether for or against both the genre and romanticism itself. And it's there, in the mother who gave birth to the guilty doubt, let's call it that, where it grows and even captivates.

The result seems so rigorously and consciously false that you have no choice but to believe it. Without a doubt, the romantic meta-comedy of the year , this year and any other.

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Director : Celine Song. Starring : Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, Chris Evans, Marin Ireland. Running Time : 109 minutes. Nationality : United States.