Can Past Lives director Celine Song make another great love triangle movie?

Canadian director Celine Song is back with her sophomore film, Materialists. The romantic drama follows a high-end matchmaker (Dakota Johnson) in a love triangle with her wealthy client (Pedro Pascal) and her broke ex-boyfriend (Chris Evans). 

This film comes after Song received a best picture nomination for her debut film, Past Lives, which is also about a love triangle.

Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud discusses with entertainment reporter Jackson Weaver and film critics Sarah-Tai Black and Rachel Ho if Materialists lives up to Song's past work.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion on two other new films, Boxcutter, and the live-action remake of How To Train Your Dragon, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Rachel, when you think about this movie and what Celine Song is trying to do here, what do you like about this story that Celine Song's trying to tell?

Rachel: I think that there's a really long and rich history in literature and cinema of these romantic relationship things. Like, what do women want? What do people want? What do you want from a relationship? Jane Austen did a lot of it. We had the really quirky stuff with Cary Grant and the Golden Age. It's all about feels in the '80s and '90s and the 2000s. Those rom-coms were less about the idea of women being property, or people being property, or relationships — or marriage, more specifically — being a business proposition. The '80s,'90s, 2000s, it was more about chemistry, it was more about: do you actually love somebody? Which is a wild notion. 

And then Celine kind of brings it back to what it was before, which is a very age-old question, an age-old predicament of: do you marry for love or do you marry for convenience? Do you marry for security for life, for the safety of being in a partnership like that, [that's] usually economic? So I enjoy that her film adds to that. I think that it's a very realistic way of looking at relationships in 2025, to an extent. I do think that as much as it didn't quite work for me, I think it is a good addition to that really rich tradition of looking at relationships and how they are in a very specific time period. And I think that you could definitely time stamp that thought — the mentality that a lot of the characters have — with 2025. 

Elamin: Sarah-Tai, what do you make of the chemistry between Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans? 

Sarah-Tai: Chris is obviously one of people's favourite Chrises, he's in the Chris trifecta. Pedro Pascal is the it-boy of the moment — besides being obviously conventionally attractive and all that, he's incredibly charming, like this man could charm like a rubber plant, some people are just good at being likable in relation to people in space and in language. The one thing is that Dakota Johnson is not any of those things. I'm not trying to be mean! I find her offensiveness as a nepo baby actually so inoffensive. Like she could be so much worse, but she's not. She could be so much better, but she's not. I think she's really a two-note actor. I think she has slightly improved over the years. But she just doesn't have a lot of chemistry with Chris and Pedro on screen here. I think Chris and Pedro actually have more chemistry with each other. 

Dakota Johnson — I might be projecting here because, like Chris Evans's character, I'm a poor boy — doesn't really have that quality as an actor where you can get past the patina surrounding her performances to something more sincere. Like, I don't know, maybe she's just had too comfortable of a life. But the thing about this film is that it really demands, in specific moments, an ability to perform that sincerity, especially because this is a film that so many of the thematics are specifically about the insincerities of dating and romance. And there's something also about Celine Song's filmmaking style and writing style that really necessitates having an actor who can sit in stillness, who can sit in prolonged moments. And sadly, Dakota Johnson just doesn't have that for me. And I think that that is actually a huge part of why the film wasn't a success for me personally. 

Elamin: Rachel started us off by laying out some of the things that this movie's trying to grapple with. Maybe it's closer to Age of Innocence than it is to When Harry Met Sally. There's something about, "Hey, what is this institution of marriage for?" That's a hard question to ask in a rom-com, and yet this movie is being advertised as a rom-com. Jackson, is that misleading for this movie to be positioned that way?

Jackson: First off, yeah, because there's almost no "com" in this rom-com. There's one scene involving Pedro Pascal in a kitchen crouching, that's funny. But other than that, there's not really any comedy in this rom-com. 

And also I think it deals with the artificialities of romance in the modern day in a way that I think actually works in one of Dakota Johnson's two notes because she is inaccessible and she's artificial as a character, which works with her — I agree — nepo acting style. She's inaccessible until maybe a switch at the end. But I do think that there's a depth here, kind of a meta-analysis on how materialistic relationships actually can be and how they are business commodities. And they literally speak about them in this Aaron Sorkin-esque finance bro talk, about like, "What assets do you have? What debts do you have in love?" And when you have that kind of baked into Celine Song's, I guess, filmography now after Past Lives, it does, I think, make it something other than a rom-com, at least in the first half.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Ty Callender.