影评 | 《物质主义者》—— 当《爱情神话》从上海走到纽约

《物质主义者》—— 当《爱情神话》从上海走到纽约
物质主义者（Materialists）

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作者/导演：Celine Song

类型：喜剧 爱情

制片国家/地区：美国 芬兰

上映时间/书的创作年代：2025年6月北美上映（目前未引进）


前言



无论是身处辉煌的经济上行期，还是面对post-pandemic时代无孔不入的精神危机，抛却对「爱情神话」的信仰转而拥抱「物质主义」，似乎都是最理所当然的选择；但与此同时，大洋彼岸的两位新生代女性导演，不约而同地让她们镜头下的人物给了我们一个完全相反且极尽理想化的回答。


人生海海 山山而川


纽约城内几百万的各色男女，如何描绘一幅物质都市中众生恋爱的广阔图景？大多数Rom-com电影只能触及主角及其社交圈中的一部分人物；《欲望都市》或《老友记》这类时长和时间跨度都远远多于电影的剧集也同样会选择朋友关系的视角切入。



但对电影创作者来说，matchmaker显然是一个更巧妙也更有雄心的视角；能够以此展开也得益于导演Celine Song本人的亲身经历。在凭借出道作品《过往人生》(Past Lives) 收获两项奥斯卡提名而声名鹊起之前，她也曾是在纽约过着拮据生活的剧作家，靠兼职当matchmaker补贴收入。



提到matchmaker，你会想到什么样的形象？是乡土社会中说媒拉纤、脸上带着一颗痣的媒婆？还是单位里热心帮人介绍对象的大哥大姐？



印象中，上一次见到以matchmaker为职业的角色，还是美剧《了不起的麦瑟尔夫人》中女主角的妈妈。放在上个世纪50-60年代的纽约，这是为数不多的适合upper-middle-class的家庭妇女接触社会的选项。举止优雅得体又深谙婚姻相处之道的Rose穿梭于各类茶室，和操心子女婚姻的母亲们会面打电话，那种催婚催生的劲头简直无国界跨时代，而此时的「牵线搭桥」还停留在一小撮同阶层的熟人团体中，评头论足但小心翼翼，依稀保留着前现代社会的触感。



换到当下的纽约，matchmaker又呈现出怎样的形象？



主角Lucy告诉我们，这份工作已然失去了传统印象中的那种人情味，甚至有一种精神上的冷漠与残酷，「像在停尸房工作」。


每一个她经手的客户，都可以被简化为用几个标签概括，模板类似于「种族+职业+身材」，这是比中山公园相亲角里递简历还更有效率的筛选方式；要找到perfect match，不是靠人与人之间的熟悉和了解，更没有熟人社交圈中隐含的担保意味，而是do the maths，让每一个可量化标准加在一起后得出相匹配的结果。



有时，这种匹配毋宁说是「营销」—— 为产品精准地找到市场定位和受众人群，并完成一系列前期宣传、客户维护和售后工作，比如用「你一定会找到真爱」这样的话术来提振客户信心，或在婚礼前新娘临时反悔时「危机公关」，力挽狂澜地劝回来。



如果用市场营销的视角来看这一场约会游戏，很多原本难以理解的现象就说得通了，比如为什么一个30+的纽约的女律师会成为Lucy手中最难匹配的客户——因为「普通」。商品不怕价高，也不怕质劣，只怕「普通」。价高可以成为奢侈品，质劣可以低价放上拼多多，而「普通」意味着平庸和可替代，会因为毫无特别之处而失去卖点、泯然众人。



而当年薪8万美元的Lucy开始自己的约会游戏，坐在一个身家上亿的金融精英面前，她的逻辑又被评价为「caveman」了。当然不是因为这种计算方式本身有什么不对，而是公式太粗糙——



这段话浪漫吗？当然浪漫，因为一个富有又充满魅力的人看到了世俗中那个平凡的你，愿意真心欣赏你身上未能尽情闪耀的光辉，如同《傲慢与偏见》中那个放下了傲慢的Mr. Darcy。



讽刺吗？当然是讽刺的，因为他形容的关键词居然是「intangible assests」，你的每一项优点所构成的是一种值得长期持有的、能带来回报的资产，他所述说的每一条理由都可以无缝衔接用于boss直聘时挖角高薪人才——「懂得规则」、「看清世界的运作方式」、「让我尊重且信任」、「比我知道的更多」。



就在2013年的美国政治剧《纸牌屋》（House of Cards）中，主角Frank和Claire那种强强联手、优势互补的政治联姻型婚姻还被认为是一种极其不寻常的形态，属于那种将攫取名利视为人生至高成就，押注生命中一切因而断情绝爱的少数精英。



而到了2025年的今天，「断情绝爱」已经成为中文互联网的常用词汇，婚姻与所谓「浪漫爱」的捆绑关系正被加速解构，逐步演化为一种更有效率的商业合作关系——风险最高的那种，因为你只能挑选唯一的一位合伙人，订立一个涉及人身、家庭、子嗣、财产的多方位长期深度绑定，也无怪乎电影女主对着客户可以赤裸裸地说出这样一句话：「Marriage is a business deal. And it always has been, since the very first time two people did it.」



当「爱情」变成上古神话


在电影结尾，女主角通过独白抛出了这样一个问题：当人类历史上第一对一夫一妻制的夫妇喜结连理时，是什么原因驱动了他们这样的选择？



在一部以现代都市为背景板的电影中加入这样的拷问，无疑为整部电影增添了厚度，也让我们得以用一种在时间尺度上更深远的视角窥见导演的创作意图。



如果把创历史的第一对夫妻看作纯粹的物质主义者，那么这就是私有制确立的标志之一，因为私有财产的继承需要血缘关系确定的后代；用更宏大的视角来说，一夫一妻制确是维系资本主义制度的必要手段；如果一定要说他们之间第一次生发了具有唯一性、排他性的「爱情」，那这听起来的确像个上古神话。



2021年，邵艺辉导演的拍出了《爱情神话》，但似乎讲的并不是神话。这个故事氤氲在上海街头混杂着小资腔调和文艺气息的烟火中，让两个中年人之间的情愫落地发芽；而这部《物质主义者》反而讲述了一段「爱情神话」，一位曾经受困于都市物欲、决心彻底拥抱物质主义的女性，又重新在人与人之间的情感联结中找到了熨帖和意义。



物质与精神的二元对立如何在亲密关系中调和？爱情是否为人生之必要？婚姻与爱情能否重新解绑……这些都是太过宏大的命题，我相信高明的导演无意用一部电影作出回答，当然也不屑于借由带着浪漫色彩的结局「哄骗」观众走入爱情或婚姻。电影的结局从来都不构成答案，大部分情况下也无关价值判断。这些问题的答案，是观众自己的人生课题，也只能由观众自己回答。



在主旨之外，有一个细节却值得玩味——这两部作品中，都有一位不具名但分量不轻的角色。这两个角色，一个是上海，一个是纽约。



在充满爱意的镜头下，两位导演不约而同地把自己长期居住的物质都市拍出了温暖可人的质感。短短两小时左右的时间里，上海老克勒的精打细算乃至下意识的排外竟有些可爱，在小街上骑着共享单车的行人显得轻松而悠然；纽约丽人Lucy上班前的日常没有《穿普拉达的女王》中那样的焦虑和紧绷，走过的公园和街道皆是自成风景。



似乎对导演Celine Song而言，低房租的Brooklyn和Williamsburg是怀旧而宜居的，Tribeca区价值1200万美金的公寓也没有散发着冰冷锐利的气息；穿过树荫打在门前台阶上的阳光时常明媚，咖啡馆和餐厅的后景总是泛着暖调的金黄色灯光。



这是一种无言无声的偏袒，即使是擅长给纽约写话痨情书的伍迪·艾伦也难以如此行云流水、天衣无缝。



如果这两部电影的情节都无法安慰到封心锁爱的观众，那也没有关系啊，至少我们可以爱上一个可爱的城市，爱上一个有热心的老板的打折超市，爱上一个能和朋友抽烟聊天的阳台。爱上自己生活着的「附近」，又何尝不是一种「爱情神话」。



过往人生

96届Oscar 提名最佳原创剧本

81届Golden Globe 提名最佳导演 最佳编剧



Celine Song

居住在美国的韩裔加拿大导演



https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/aug/03/celine-song-interview-materialists-past-lives-dakota-johnson-pedro-pascal-chris-evans



She’s frustrated, she tells me, that people have described one of the characters in her film, a private equity manager with a $12m apartment, as a “billionaire”. “If you’re a billionaire, your big apartment is not $12m!” she exclaims. “A billion dollars is not a hundred of $1m,” she adds. “No, it’s a thousand of that.”



She’s offended because a billionaire would never be a likable character in her movie. “I think because of how visible billionaires are, we think that’s what wealth is. And I’m like: no, that’s just crime.”



Romantic comedies, particularly those set in New York City, tend to be escapist fantasies: you’re not supposed to wonder how the heroine can afford to live in a swanky one-bedroom in Manhattan or wear Louboutins; you’re certainly not supposed to ponder the moral implications of the hero’s wealth.



But in Materialists, every detail is spelled out. Early in the film, Lucy (Johnson) announces to Harry (Pascal) that she makes “$80,000 a year before taxes” – something the private equity partner should keep in mind before pursuing her. The characters’ apartments, Song says, were carefully researched and designed based on their economic situations. There’s Harry’s $12m penthouse in the expensive Manhattan neighbourhood Tribeca. Lucy lives in an aspirational studio in the posh neighbourhood of Brooklyn Heights that she rented right before the Covid-19 pandemic (Song looked on US real estate website Zillow to estimate the rent);Evans’s character John lives with three roommates in south-west Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. (It was supposed to be in Williamsburg, before the film’s construction crew said that he’d never be able to afford that.)

There’s no such wistful dreaming in Materialists. Harry’s romantic overture to Lucy is to tell her that he’s interested in her “intangible assets”; he wants to date the broker, the person who decides who is and isn’t valuable. “I feel like as we grow into this efficiency-focused, productivity-focused way of thinking about the world, everything we do is so that we can be better, faster, stronger,” Song says of our culture of relentless optimisation. “Where is the place where you’re just like an animal who’s trying to live?”



She had wanted to make a film about the experience for years, but the script had never quite worked. Then she realised why. “I thought the focus was on the clients. But the problem is that the clients are not that interesting, because they all want the same thing. If I asked 10 clients what kind of guy they wanted, they would all say: over 6ft tall, makes more money than me, great body, strong hairline.”

Lucy eventually undergoes a reckoning in Materialists, but Song doesn’t judge her protagonist too harshly. She has deep empathy for women like her, who trust in logic to rescue them. She brings up the “tradwife” trend taking over social media, where women embrace traditional gender roles and domesticity, as a symptom of a crisis beneath the surface. “I think it has so much to do with how deeply broken our economic systems are, especially in the US. As we have learned, the American dream is not achievable. You cannot jump your class. But what’s one of the few ways that you can still jump your class? Well, marriage.”

The genre is more or less dead today, or relegated to Christmas specials on streaming services. Even A24, which distributed the movie in the US, seemed to be self-conscious about releasing a romcom: the company published a “syllabus” for Materialists, a list of Song’s reference films, replete with highbrow names such as Thomas Vinterberg and Mike Leigh, as well as Merchant Ivory productions and Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence. But Song herself is unselfconscious about her love for romances.



“I still remember showing Past Lives at this festival in Ireland,” she says. “This one really burly Irish guy was asking me a question during the Q&A. And he started crying, telling me the story of his own childhood sweetheart. And I remember thinking: it’s funny that when it comes to the matters of love, we relegate it to the girlies. But the truth is that everybody’s just actually starved of love and affection. I knew, when I was making Materialists, that there is a very real market for it.”



https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a65057383/materialists-celine-song-interview/



That’s the way many of the film’s characters think and talk, seeing potential matches as a collection of resumes and profile factoids, as opposed to multifaceted individuals with real lives and feelings. Portraying these harsh and unflattering realities is no easy task, and Song deserves all the credit for perceptively depicting them. She walks a very fine line between acknowledging these truths and holding onto timeless notions like love and romance for dear life. “That was the dilemma of the movie,” she explains. “And the dilemma of modern people, too. All I can really speak to is how this dilemma feels to me personally. What’s amazing about New York City is, it’s both a city of romantics—because all of us here are dreaming and hoping for something—and cynics. To survive in New York City, you have to be cynical, too. You have to be practical and materially smart.”



Part of the reason why Materialists works so well is Song’s dexterity in portraying how romance and cynicism pull against one another. “While I was a matchmaker, I was asking my clients to describe their ideal partner and the answers were all numbers: height, weight, income, age… While I understood why they were asking for those things, I knew from being in love myself that that’s just not at all what love is about or feels like. So [making this] movie was about [striking] the balance between the practical and the fantasy of true love.” Sure enough, Song succeeds and gives us complex characters whom she doesn’t judge, even in their darkest and most shallow moments. “I don’t mean to say that the judgment is not there. Of course, all of us are judging each other at all times in some way,” she explains. “But the thing that feels true to me is about recognizing where the character actually comes from. Why is that character going through that?”



Throughout Materialists, there is this notion of a non-negotiable—the thing you aren’t willing to compromise on while choosing your significant other. For Song, that thing is simple: “That they love me,” the self-professed romantic says. “Love is meaningless unless it’s unconditional. And that, to me, is non-negotiable.” This answer isn’t going to surprise anyone who’s already seen Materialists and shed some happy tears in front of the film’s proudly non-cynical ending.



In the end, this is the idea and feeling that Song wants everyone to take away from the film. “You can see the movie as a looking glass, or you can see it as a mirror. It’s personal, and the dream of this movie is for the audiences to take it personally, to let it get under their skin,” the director says. “You can refuse a $12 million apartment. But [it is] a crime against yourself is to say no to love.”



https://time.com/7282305/celine-song-materialists-interview/



Song lasted just six months on the job, but she knew as soon as she left that she would write about the experience. “I learned more about people in those six months than I did in any other part of my life,” she says. “I knew more than their therapists because they were willing to tell me their hearts’ desires in a way that was so frank and objective.”



“That is me being open about how this is serious sh-t. People call romances chick flicks,” says Song. “Of course it’s tied to misogyny. But when people say it’s not important, I ask, ‘Not as important as what?’ When you watch a movie, we don’t all know what it’s like to save the world. But we know what it’s like to fall in love. It’s the biggest drama in our lives. It’s vital, and we need to talk about it more.”



Materialists is also a love triangle film featuring a two-men-one woman entanglement much like Past Lives. Song rolls her eyes when I bring up the similarity. “I spent the entire Past Lives release talking about how it’s not a love triangle of that kind. It’s actually more of a love triangle between a person’s past, present, and future,” she says, laughing at her own exasperation. “And everyone’s talking about it like love triangles aren’t a fundamental part of every f-cking romance film. That’s the will-they-won’t-they. That’s the tension.”



It’s also the dream. Lucy’s dilemma, being wooed by two devastatingly handsome men, beats the hellish dating scene in which her clients are rejected for facile reasons. The movie at times borders on cynicism, and working as matchmaker could make anyone jaded. But Song insists that she is, at heart, a romantic. “Is it worth it? Why can’t I just pursue somebody who is 6’ tall and makes a certain amount of money? Why should I look for this thing that feels elusive and has only ever caused me heartbreak?” she asks. “I know from my own experience that, yes, it is definitely worth it. I wish it wasn’t, because then we could just quit. But we can’t quit.”



https://theasiancut.com/interview/materialists-interview-directed-by-celine-song/



TAC: I feel so grateful that you do talk about it because you can tell with the character, she does feel a bit of shame about it and she shouldn’t because it’s not her fault that this happened to her, but you talk about it. And so it’s almost, I don’t know, it kind of opens up the possibility for dialogue amongst the people who are watching it. So thank you for doing that. I wanted to also talk about New York City. You make it seem so dreamy and beautiful. It’s almost a character. It’s like this very hazy, beautiful character. What were your intentions in capturing New York City, did you want it to be a character?



Song: Yeah, of course. Well, I feel like it’s a city that I really love. I’ve lived there for 14 years since moving away from Toronto. And I think that there’s a difference between liking a thing and loving a thing, and loving a thing means that you are also going to accept the parts of the city that are darker and have some flaws. You know what I mean? That’s what love is, right? Liking something anybody can do. But so I always am interested in depicting New York City and the way that people who live there might experience it, which I think would be true of any of my hometowns, including Toronto, where I’d be like, if you asked me what’s my Toronto, it would always be some street that I walk by just outside of my house a hundred times. And that’s actually the most romantic place that you could imagine. So I think that’s the kind of way that I wanted to look at the way New York City is shot. We don’t have a drone shot, you know what I mean? It’s not about the way that New York is always seen, it’s always about the way New York is seen that you can walk to.



TAC: What do you want people to take away from the film?



Song: Oh, well, I feel like this film is as romantic as I could muster, given my own cynicism and my own practicality and my own materialism. And I think that I was trying to be as honest as I can about the limit of how romantic I feel about it. And I think that to me, so it’s not really a matter of, well, this is what it is. It’s so much more about, well, what does this actually reflect for you? So much of it, I think of it as more of a way for us to start a conversation. I feel like I want to ask, what did it inspire in you? Or what did you think about when you were watching this movie about the way you love, and the way that you date? To me, it’s really a question that starts a conversation more than me saying like, well, this is what it is. I mean, this is what it is for me as a person who made it. So now the rest of it is about the audience that is going to show up. And my dream for the movie is that if you show up with whoever that you watch the movie with, you want on the way out of the movie theatre for the conversation to be beautiful and vibrant and deep. And I want this conversation to be about getting to know each other deeper.