Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal together in a romantic comedy? The rubbing of hands generates sparks. “Material Love”, at the cinema from September 4th, has more potential to disappoint than surprising. Because it is not that type of romantic comedy. To say one, you never laugh. At most he smiles, bitter. Because it is a film with three Hollywood Olympus stars, of course, but it is also and above all a Celine Song film.

Do you remember Past Lives? Here, he writes and directs him the same director, here to his second film that has again to do with the exploration of human relationships, with the crossroads of life and with love at the time of the dating app. Under the exhausting beauty of the surface, an existentialist work is then insinuated without being a greve, shiny examination and also somewhat intrusively in the dazzling circle of glamor.

New York, elegance, money. And love?

Elegance certainly is not lacking. It could not be otherwise if you put the film in the hands of Dakota Johnson, who with his controlled and imperative bearing holds the Upper Class of a New York in melancholy grain in Bridus (Shabier Kirchner’s photography). It’s called Lucy and it’s a matchmaker, one of those ‘City’ works that don’t seem true jobs. He takes care of drawing up profiles of wealthy customers who hire it and then cross them and understand who may feel good with whom. Do not make you illusions, here love is not chemical, but late capitalist synthesis of a society modeled on the parameter as an index of contemporary existence.

What does such a person do? Age, physical form, ethnicity, income, political orientation. Ah, obviously also the height, recurring and crucial hook in the course of Material Love (in original the most cynical material title), a bizarre and completely illogical element as the accounting company that describes and on which the rhythic of exchanges and reflections between the characters is repeated and on which it is repeatedly. That’s all, this is. “Marriage is a deal.” Exit and relate is a skirmish between lawyers, the point one of a contract to be drawn up with technical-economic language.

Lucy is inside up to the neck, Cupid without arrows and with calculation tables at the Wall Street. How could you believe in love? The only temptation is to let himself be approached to a wedding from what they call a “unicorn” in his field. A man to represent an impossible fantasy, yet real: beautiful, polite, sensual, rich broken through. In short, the desk that puts on the game, with peace to the soul of all the others. Who if not Pedro Pascal? Choice of casting at the dot that pairs with the actor’s divide statute, opposed to the former flame of Lucy, Chris Evans’ John. It is the waiter at that marriage, he is prominent and unguarded in the name and facts. With him there was love, but there was also being to green.

Rewrite the romantic comedy

Just observe them to understand how song works in the cross -section of the usual stereotypes of this kind of film, taking a typical structure with a typical line to be dissolved. Love as an investment, a nucleus harnessed in boxes to be ticked that Material Love wants to free, while around the Millennial disorientation commented in comparison with the debris of the (their) world: to be rich or not to be anyone.

Starting from this song re-interprets the language of the romantic comedy and reversed with consistency with respect to what interests you. The idea of ​​the triangle as an interference to be crossed and not to reject is in her investigation figure – also in that of the husband of the Canadian author, Justin Kuritzkes, screenwriter of Challengers by Luca Guadagnino.

And in its figure there are also the refinement and class with which the staging is organized: from locations to clothing, from the lighting of the places to the direction of the actors. As well as the fluidity with which Song crosses the stages of change of the film, hand in hand with the neurotic but not nervous dissertations of characters who are discovered in crisis in front of us. In this regard, for the style and ability of synthesis, the assembly that comments on the birth of the mathematical relationship between Lucy and Harry is emblematic.

An unpublished and almost apocalyptic step

The director chooses a step that suspends time in mid -air, isolates the protagonists in an appearance of quiet in the center of the room. A bearing therefore impossible (here: here lies the fantasy of love that agitates underdown) for the rhythms of a metropolis that never stops. Do you get to sex? Yes, but if it is there you can’t see. It is no longer perceived as an instrument of conquest on the other. Beauty is an asset to be exposed, not to be consumed. For Song it is another frontier to be resurfaced.

Material Love uses this scientific emptying of heat to create an unpublished feeling of perdition in Romcom. Under the faces, the bodies and the scenic imposition of this dream triptych lies the almost apocalyptic trend of the film, a dark tone in constant struggle with the light reflected in perfect features and in stained palaces. The stakes after all is the feeling, the risk of losing human irrationality. Do not fear, it does not give up: as as a manual, but outside the manual, you start there and there you end up.

VOTE: 7