Gather round summer children, Zoomers and Alphas alike, for I want to tell of a long ago time when the multiplexes were full and the choice for big screen comedies plentiful. It was a lost age of laughs and tears, and in the best romantic comedies, you’d get both: a feat always promised, too, by the soothing disembodied voice in every trailer that spoke as warmly about a film’s stars as a deacon would be reciting scripture on Sunday morning.
It was a time of cinematic glory and stars like Sandra Bullock and Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks and Hugh Grant. And it looks like it is making a comeback of sorts if Celine Song and the cunning marketers at A24 have anything to say about it. In the latest trailer for Materalists, the indie studio which has purposefully made itself synonymous in marketing with neon colors and often strobing electronica beats—or the veiled menace of some obscured horror that’s breathlessly whispered about via film festival pull-quotes from shocked critics—has instead curiously taken a page out of what could be mistaken for a 1990s or early 2000s rom-com produced by one of the major studios before they became intoxicated with the allure of IP.
… And to be honest, it works! After spending less than two minutes with Dakota Johnson’s Lucy, a professional matchmaker who curiously is somehow always the bridesmaid and never the bride, we are convinced that the stakes of who she will choose between the older and worldly, and rich, Harry (an indefatigable Pedro Pascal), and nice guy underachiever John (Chris Evans), is of greater importance than the fates of all the multiversal incursions combined!
Also to be fully earnest for a second, as dopamine-pleasing as it is to our nostalgia glands to hear a cordial trailer voice promise this movie is “a modern take on what true love is really worth,” a reason to be seriously excited is the Celine Song of it all. Song of course wrote and directed the achingly beautiful Past Lives, an elegiac original which last year was nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. An unconventional love story of sorts, Past Lives was a movie suffused with great romance and even greater empathy for the human experience in its tale of two childhood friends grown apart over a lifetime.
With Materialists, Song and her distributor are leaning into the half-forgotten conventions and traditions of a grandly made romantic comedy, but one suspects Materialists will be more than just a throwback. The hope is that like Past Lives before it, Song is using cinematic storytelling expectations and staples to offer a humane and genuine look at something as timeless as… a love triangle between three people.
The fact it also stars three big name actors who have done their time in the IP trenches also cannot hurt. Materialists opens on June 13 in the U.S. and Aug. 15 in the UK.
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