In times of emotional shopping, the real risk is no longer falling in love, but being picked out like a discounted product.
— Eva Illouz
In her new film Material Love, Celine Song brings to the screen an ambiguous reflection on the transformation of love into a contractual algorithm. Set in a New York filtered through digital geometries and economic impulses, the film offers no answers, only simple questions: what is love today, if not an agreement between two parties required to meet predefined criteria? How much room is left for actual feeling when the meeting between two people takes place through a matchmaking agency that selects partners based on demographic data, political tendencies, physical traits, and even economic coefficients?
The beating heart of the film is not the love story itself, but its preordained, expected, engineered failure. The agency, functioning as an invisible director, no longer promises love, but compatibility. Compatibility measured by annual income, height, skin color, cultural origin, and social status. Parameters that build the ideal partner like an investment, an asset, an upgrade of the self through the other.
With a direction more precise than inspired, Song constructs a world where love is no longer a risk, but a calculation. And it is precisely in this rationalization that the film wields its critical scalpel. Because if every encounter happens only between individuals filtered by quantifiable criteria, what remains of love’s unpredictability? Where does desire fit in—desire that by definition defies norms and resists standardization?
Desire is not what is lacking, but what exceeds—and for this reason, it escapes calculation.
— Gilles Deleuze
However, not everything lands with equal force. Alongside the more nuanced and credible leads, much of the supporting cast slips into mannered performances, typical of the more formulaic end of American mainstream cinema, where the screenplay—at times clumsy and conventional—weighs the story down, making it both grating and unconvincing. One gets the sense that, despite touching on complex themes like sexual abuse and the socio-economic conditioning of emotional choices, the film ultimately aims to deliver a marketable product, tailored for universal consumption, lacking in any real formal or conceptual risk.
After all, expectations weren’t high for Celine Song, whose previous film Past Lives already seemed widely overrated. Here too, the director moves with the appearance of depth, but remains trapped in a narrative more concerned with approval than with truth.
Material Love offers no answers, but leaves behind a subtle doubt that continues to resonate even after the credits roll. It does not ask us to define what love is, but rather to observe with clarity what it has become in its most domesticated and commodified form: a catalogue of desirable traits, a showcase of calibrated profiles, resembling more a job market than an encounter between subjectivities. Here, the search is not for someone who knows how to love, but someone who fits: like a tailored suit, a custom product, a line item in a database. And yet, the vertigo of authentic love—that which eludes all logic, which borders on the irrational, the excessive, the disproportionate—is anesthetized, reduced to a transaction between bodies animated by compatible needs. The true short-circuit, then, lies not so much in the system, but in the way it is accepted—indeed, in the way people ask and pay to be selected.
The society of control dreams of a safe, predictable, guaranteed love. But love, by definition, is the unexpected.
— Slavoj Žižek
