Materialists · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man sits down across a table and lists what he wants. Height. Income. Someone who reads. Lucy writes it down, because it's her job, and because none of it is unreasonable. Later she goes home to an ex who has none of those things.

That table is the whole film. Celine Song was a playwright before she was a filmmaker, and Materialists is built almost entirely out of two people seated opposite each other, held in one sustained shot for long enough that you stop tracking the sentences and start noticing the seating. Who ordered. Who is being interviewed. Who has the list. This is Song's particular invention, carried over from Past Lives and sharpened here: she stages courtship as an appraisal, and then declines to cut away from it.

Deleuze has a word for what she's doing, and it isn't a word about dialogue. He took the gest from Brecht: a posture or attitude that makes a social relation visible in the body. Not what a character is feeling, but what position they occupy, written in how they sit. Song's staging is nothing but gests. The dossier describes her blocking as a dramatist's attention to who sits where, who holds power, who is being appraised, and that is exactly the level at which the film transmits information. The common complaint about Materialists is that it's talky and inert. The gest is the answer to the complaint. The drama isn't in the lines. It's in the arrangement.

Then there's the talk itself, which does something stranger than express feeling. In Rohmer, Deleuze noticed that characters don't act on desire, they reason about it out loud, and the reasoning is the action. He filed this under the reflection-image, and its discursive variety: an image that poses a problem it cannot resolve inside itself, so it hands the problem to you. My Night at Maud's is the template, and the debt is direct. A romantic choice adjudicated almost entirely through articulate conversation, the camera patient on people arguing themselves toward or away from what they want. Song inherits the method and changes the vocabulary. Rohmer's characters argue about grace and probability. Lucy's clients argue about salary bands and dealbreakers.

Which brings us to the object the whole film orbits: the client file. Deleuze's category of thirdness covers images that mean something only through relations the viewer holds in mind, and its densest form is the symbol — a single object that condenses the film's organizing relation. The spec sheet is that object. Height requirements, income, the checklist. Everything in the movie routes back through it, including the scenes it isn't in. Once you've seen the intake form, you can't watch a dinner without hearing the arithmetic underneath.

The honest thing to say is that Deleuze's cinema books don't quite have a name for what that form does to a person, but his last essays do. In his short piece on control societies he wrote that the individual has become a dividual: not a whole person but a divisible profile, a set of comparable values, and the mass a databank. He meant it about banking and schooling. Materialists is a movie about it happening to romance. Song's matchmaking office is staged as a stock exchange for intimacy, and the film's argument is that everyone in it has learned to hold a profile of themselves — including Lucy, a professional appraiser of other people who cannot stop appraising herself.

The formal cost of this is patience, and Song pays it. The cutting withholds momentum where a rom-com would accelerate, holding on faces long enough for what Deleuze called a potisign to register: not an emotion already formed, but micro-movements building across a face toward a threshold. Johnson plays composure and its cracks, and the cracks are only legible because the shot doesn't leave. Pascal declines to make the rich suitor a straw man. Evans plays financial defeat without a single heroic angle. All three performances depend on the frame staying put.

What this does to narrative is a small demolition. The romantic comedy is arguably the last mass-market survivor of what Deleuze called the action-image: a situation is perceived, a decisive gesture is made, the situation is transformed, usually in an airport. Song keeps the whole apparatus — New York, the matchmaker premise, the triangle, the movie stars — and withholds the gesture. Crises are underplayed. Reversals are quiet. The triangle stops being a plot to be resolved and becomes a diagnostic instrument, a way of forcing Lucy to say out loud what her criteria actually are.

And then the film does something the genre has no equipment for. Sexual violence enters the story. Deleuze distinguishes a mark, an object that means what it customarily means (see a matchmaker, expect a wedding), from a demark, the anomaly that breaks the chain and forces you to start interpreting rather than anticipating. The intake form has no field for this. That break is where the film's glossy surface stops being a surface and becomes the subject.

The lineage runs deep and it's an economic lineage as much as a formal one. Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage gives Song the clinical two-shot in which intimacy is audited like a ledger. Linklater's Before Sunset gives her the editing principle: cut to preserve the unbroken rhythm of two people talking, not to keep a story moving. Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility supplies the Austen arithmetic, pounds per year deciding who may love whom, which Song secularizes into a dating app's filters. Scorsese's The Age of Innocence supplies the structure most exactly — a restrained, beautiful surface over a substrate of pure social bookkeeping. Bazin argued that cinema could hold theatre honestly as long as it kept the space and the duration intact rather than chopping them into coverage. Song's whole method is that argument, still working, sixty years on.

It's too early to name what Materialists seeds, but its bet is legible: A24 spending star wattage on a mid-budget adult drama, a category the studios abandoned, to test whether conversation can still hold a theatrical screen. If the bet lands, the inheritance is the Rohmer method at movie-star scale.

Watch it again for the tables. Notice who is holding the list in each scene, and notice the exact moment Lucy stops being the one holding it. The film leaves a real question open, which is why it stings: once you've learned to compare people, is choosing one of them still love, or just a better-executed transaction? Song doesn't answer. She just keeps the camera on the face doing the math.