*** This piece contains spoilers for Materialists and Past Lives ***
After watching Materialists, it’s clear that the world has finally regained what was lost with Nora Ephron’s death. There’s a woman slightly digging about romance, writing about women questioning choices of the heart and mind, while making the men rotate around them, like the string section surrounding a trombone soloist in Maurice Ravel’s orchestral piece “Boléro.” It’s difficult to watch her most recent film without immediately remembering Song’s feature debut, Past Lives. Nora Moon (Greta Lee) and Lucy (Dakota Johnson) are the trombone players, while their men rotate in a semicircle around them, without actively participating in the smooth, slithering piece of music both women individually play. There’s something about the way Celine Song shows her women. Whether Nora Moon or Lucy, they’re both grounded in realism, even though they secretly wish whatever fantasy they once dreamed of is true. They never let their hearts dictate their paths, but they cling to those fragile hearts like bonnets from a bygone era.
Where they diverge is in the choices they make and how they carry themselves in the world. Lucy carries her white privilege, a tall, beautiful woman with the body and the grace of a model-turned-actress (even if in reality she’s just another beautiful failed actress-turned-matchmaker. She looks sultry, her beauty oozing a confidence that could also be a mask for latent insecurities. Nora Moon is an immigrant woman, a calm kind of beauty, someone who knows her place in the world, and the constant struggles she will keep facing and meeting, how her background marks her choices while holding on secretly to that place of love in her heart, even if she knows she can’t give in to it completely. Where Lucy walks among professions that rely highly on the aesthetic, Nora Moon hides behind papers and words, dreaming in Korean and confusing her kind husband, but also allowing her origins to fade into the background.
As Lucy and Nora Moon both navigate choices of the heart and mind, viewers are left to wonder, what do we root for regarding those two? One chooses her heart, the other chooses building a stable, ambitious life. Lucy is marked by the reckless freedom to be whoever she wants in the world, even if that choice will most probably have consequences, preventing her from living a life she aspires to. Nora Moon, on the other hand, has to “achieve” that status in society or else there will be no place for her. No one likes a loser immigrant, but the world is kinder to a smart, intelligent white woman making a loser choice in the realms of love and relationships, which subsequently casts a shadow over her.
Had Nora Moon been in Materialists, would she make the same decision as Lucy? Would she have the liberty to turn down Harry (Pedro Pascal) in favor of John (Chris Evans)? No two roads are the same, and it’s unfair to compare Arthur (John Magaro) with Harry. Arthur is an average American man. A writer: no more nor less. Yes, he and Nora Moon meet and fall in love, and she marries him for reasons Lucy would consider practical, but it’s the type of relationship where people fall into the mutual benefits and comfort they provide one another. Yes, Arthur gives Nora Moon the green card that secures her a U.S. residency, but that’s about it. Harry would’ve given Lucy the world at her feet, and yet she clings to her struggles with John. So again, if Nora Moon was in Materialists, still hung up on her “past lives” entanglements with Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), would she still choose Harry over Hae Sung? Or is that out of the question for Nora Moon, whose life and choices, marked by her status as a South Korean immigrant who had to change her name to fit in a new society, are never easy?
Song poses that deep dark question about love in both films. Both Nora Moon and Lucy are women who leave. They are women who like to calculate their steps and their moves, they weigh their chances and understand the limitations of their circumstances. Like Nora Moon, Lucy was not born into wealth, and her insistence to marry a wealthy man stems from her fear of being dragged into poverty by her heart, repeating past traumas of parents who failed her. While Nora Moon’s problem is deeply rooted in her racial identity, Lucy’s is a class issue. Both girls not winning in life, each on a different trajectory than the other. But if we’re being honest, Nora Moon has talent, she is a writer. She is an active participant in the New York art scene. Lucy’s talent is her persona, the one she puts on to attract her clients, a fading token from her previous acting days. But they’re both smart and calculating, weighing their options as women growing old alone, having to rely on their survival skills. They’re not naive, with their cases being Lucy growing poor in New York, and Nora Moon an immigrant wanting to do whatever she could to belong to a foreign society.
But why are their choices different? Why does Lucy give up her calculating mind while Nora Moon remains with her good husband, savoring what she once had with Hae Sung as an unfulfilled desire, an unconsummated love story that will forever haunt her like Mrs.Chan in In the Mood For Love? Is it a culture difference -a phrase a woman like me hears all the time whenever a relationship with a foreigner fails- or is it something related to the complex nature of both characters?
I don’t think Celine Song wants us to know. Or is she leaving us to project our own thoughts and feelings on those two women, finding love and identity in the merciless city? Either way, Materialists is worth a watch, if not for the rom-comness of it all then for the brutal honesty with which it analyzes the feelings of a modern woman caught between her pulsating heart and the harsh truths of our reality.
