Material, Girls

Annie Berke watches Celine Song’s new film “Materialists” and the Netflix show “With Love, Meghan.”

By Annie BerkeJune 29, 2025

• Film

• Television

This essay is part of the Screen Shots series, fresh takes from LARB’s own film and TV team.

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CELINE SONG’S new film Materialists opens with a “Dawn of (Ro)man(ce)” sequence. Instead of the hairy apes of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the scene follows two beautiful cavepeople, appealingly scruffy, in the throes of courtship; instead of waving around bones and howling, the man presents the woman with a small, perfect daisy.

I have two thoughts as I’m watching, the first being that I must be in the wrong theater. (Dakota Johnson’s voice-over puts me at ease.) Then, my mind goes to Meghan Markle. I binged her Netflix lifestyle series With Love, Meghan (2025– ) between moments of concentrated work and distracted childcare. Many of her recipes, from crudités platters to sugar cookies, are strewn with edible flowers she refers to as “sweet” or “cute” touches. Materialists’ little daisy reminds me of a Meghan Markle garnish, even—or especially—when it comes to rest on the cavewoman’s slender finger.

Later in the movie, the daisy comes back, a tiny, delicate thing that embodies the dainty, the sauvage, the notion that the “best things in life are free.” But really, what I see when I look at it is the upcharge filler at a high-end florist. Like all films, Materialists is meant to be consumed. It doesn’t have much in the way of flavor, but it feels, as my imaginary neighbor Meghan would say, “elevated.”

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In Materialists, thin, hip thirtysomething Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is an avatar of good taste. She works as a matchmaker and has arranged multiple pedigreed unions. She approaches strangers on the street and wins over guests at fancy events, speaking in a voice that is soft yet self-assured. She is hot, she is a little bit wicked (though not irredeemably so), and she will make you believe that a long, smooth ponytail and dress shorts make for a feasible professional look.

Lucy herself is a confirmed bachelorette, but compulsory monogamy is coming for her in the form of two options: Harry (Pedro Pascal), the “unicorn” private-equity guy looking for his better half, and John (Chris Evans), the sad-eyed actor ex looking to pick up more catering gigs. Through these two men’s desire, and through the cinematography, the film frames Lucy as the most valuable of objects—she navigates the muted metropolis with ease, New York City recalibrated to match Johnson’s soft summer palette. The camera loves her. (You will know that her character has hit her lowest point when she dons a baseball cap.) She values being valuable, not being valued, which is only the same thing if you’re a Girlboss Extraordinaire in need of a wake-up call.

The problem isn’t that Materialists doesn’t live up to the promise of Past Lives (2023), though that’s certainly in the mix. The extended silences and gestural power of Song’s debut seemed in line with the film’s themes of imperfect translation and unspoken longing. Here, the controlled speech and characterization are less a motif than an aesthetic. The movie skates so lovingly across its surfaces, its own status as a luxury object, that it becomes hard to parse whether its ultimate message is wry or earnest. 

With its three’s-a-crowd premise, Materialists has been marketed as a throwback to the 1990s romantic comedy, but it isn’t that, either. Song, with all her strengths, doesn’t have a light touch. (The only joke in Past Lives that has stuck with me is that the husband character has written a book titled Boner, which might say more about my sense of humor than it does about Song’s sensibility.) Lucy’s clients are, by and large, Manhattanites who blithely demand younger models with older souls, trust fund/six-five/blue-eyed types: Nicole Holofcener characters but more self-aware, Whit Stillman types but less well read.

Am I asking for too much? Am I putting the film under too much pressure? If this movie was a drink, it would be a lavender oat milk latte (warm, floral, a bit thin). If it was bedding, it would have a staggering thread count. If it was a flower, it would be a tiny bloom, endlessly picturesque, under glass.

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From Grimm fairy tale to grimmer Hallmark movies, there’s a long-standing appetite for stories of ordinary women attracting the attention of a prince. Enter Meghan Markle to dismantle those narratives and offer a new one, in which the girl rescues that prince right back (credit: Pretty Woman) with a podcast, a Netflix deal, and a boatload of jams. Excuse me, preserves.

I watched With Love, Meghan out of order and started with the Mindy Kaling episode. I figured: I’m a fan of Mindy, Mindy is a fan of Meghan, my baby is a fan of the bottle I’m feeding her, let’s go. I’ve already read that Meghan chews out Mindy for calling her “Markle” when it’s “Sussex” now, the “little family name” of which she is so proud. It feels to me like a setup, a staged opportunity for the duchess to communicate to the public her new name, her new brand.

After all, there is a lot being staged here, quite literally, including that the house Meghan is cooking in is not, in fact, her home. “I got to set early to make you a frittata,” she explains to her guest. Detractors complained that this was a cop-out, that people would tune in to the show to see Meghan and Harry’s multimillion-dollar digs. I understand the criticism—that the couple have become a cottage industry—but it fits into the general fantasy the show provides. A home is messy; a “home” is pristine. A real kitchen serves as the chaotic heart of family life; a soundstage kitchen demands—unbelievably, blessedly—quiet on the set.

What if you took domestic life and stripped it down while, at the same time, dressing it up? It would look a lot like With Love, Meghan, all creams and golds and light woods where Materialists lives in a palette of cool hues and sleek metallics. 

The Mindy Kaling episode is about planning a children’s party, which involves building a balloon arch and assembling a rainbow-themed fruit plate. My husband catches the last 10 minutes and asks, “Where are the kids?” The two women are both mothers, presumably protective of their children and not wanting to put them on camera, but there wasn’t a gaffer’s daughter, not a Sarandos grandchild, to throw into the mix? The fruit plate remains booger-free, the china teacups intact. A children’s party with no children isn’t, to use one of Meghan’s pet words, “sweet,” but it’s nicer than the parties I attend (and host).

“If I were not the recipient of this, I would be so mad about this,” Kaling confesses as she digs into a posh parfait highlighting Meghan’s limited edition preserves. I’m not mad, I’m transfixed—though I’m also not that hungry. These blossom-adorned crostini are not meant to be chewed on but marveled over, labeled as “darling,” added to a kind of big-screen Pinterest board that smooths out the tangle of real work and real life. I can’t tell if there’s something underneath the pageantry that is drawing me in or if what I’m enjoying is the clear, shallow aesthetics of a television wishing well.

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In all its tasteful minimalism, Materialists lacks messiness, which is what makes the comparisons to ’90s romantic comedies so wrongheaded. With love (Meghan), ’90s rom-coms are the messiest bitches on the planet. (This is not the first time I have made this claim, in writing no less.) “Quiet,” “subdued,” “restrained”—all words that critics used to describe Past Lives and that will be again, likely, with Materialists—are not apt descriptors of a Sandra Bullock vehicle, a Meg Ryan performance, or a wild, gorgeous head of Julia Roberts’s hair.

And there’s no romance without a little risk. Celine Song, without a doubt, can paint a picture, which is what likely attracted these actors to their roles. Evans, Pascal, and Johnson are all superhero-franchise graduates (arguably, dropouts) in the DC Extended or Marvel Cinematic Universe—The Avengers (2012) and related; Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) and The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025); and Madame Web (2024), respectively—and this material gives them all the opportunity to play real people in a world where nary a green screen can be found. Evans plays a struggling actor living with crummy roommates, a cute twist for Captain America, even if he and Pascal might have swapped roles to greater effect. Pascal, who became the internet’s darling by being loud, silly, and unapologetic, feels fenced in as a perfect man whose voice rarely ascends above a purr. 

All three, however, can be weirder than they are here, or than they are allowed to be in general—never as snide as Chris Evans in Knives Out (2019), as unpredictable as Johnson in that Architectural Digest video with the limes or her recent appearance on Good Hang with Amy Poehler, as warmly goofy as Pascal, well, anywhere. The social media mob is drooling over their three-way press events, and rightfully so. But in the film, they are staged as alluring statues whose yearning faces are never distorted or made stupid with wanting. None of them is ever so specific as to be off-putting, but the fuzzy focus makes it hard to fall hard.

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In the Mindy Kaling episode, it’s clear who is the fan and who is the star, and the roles are promptly reversed when Alice Waters appears on WLM’s finale. As much as Kaling is starstruck by the Duchess, furiously charmed at every turn, Sussex is enamored with Waters, who is not only a restaurateur and cookbook author but also California’s foremost farm-to-table pioneer. (I try to buy a copy of Waters’s 2007 book The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution, and it is on back order, presumably because of this episode. Other titles, including 2021’s We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto and 1999’s The Chez Panisse Café Cookbook, are more readily available.) Waters talks in a quavering whisper; the two women wear complementary blue tops.

The episode doesn’t so much rub up against the notions of class as it grazes them. The women discuss urban farming and how important it is to grow one’s own food, even if it’s a tiny windowsill setup. “Having a garden is like printing your own money,” Waters states, and Meghan instantly concurs. The show has used words like affordable, expensive, and inexpensive, but has anyone said “money” until now? The subsequent image of Waters massaging vinaigrette into a bowl of crisp, colorful lettuce looks not just luxurious but obscene, like she’s greasing up a pot of money. It’s a variation on a theme: the Duchess’s gold bracelets catch the light as she places a peapod here, a radish there.

Meghan Sussex invites several chefs onto the show, but no one can top Waters—for the host, at least. “You’re speaking my language,” she gushes to her idol, “but it’s a language that I learned from you, even though we haven’t met before.” She later explains that she copied Waters’s compost arrangement: “‘Well, if Alice Waters has a beautiful copper-lidded pot, that’s what I’m going to have.’ And I have one right by our kitchen sink.” Meghan is not Waters, but if the brand proceeds apace, that is ostensibly the endgame, or, at least, what Ted Sarandos has on his vision board for her. As pleasantly as WLM goes down, there is a little tang of revenge in the dressing, every time Meghan declines her maiden name, asserts control over her family, her narrative, and her “new chapter” in her beloved California.

By contrast, I can’t figure out what’s going on with Materialists; there is a kind of melancholy behind all the beautiful things, but it is so persistent and unchanging that I wonder if I’m imagining things, if this monochrome is both visual and emotional, and if, sometimes, a grayish blue is just a grayish blue.

In the days leading up to the film’s release, Song released a list of the movies that served as reference points for Materialists, titles as varied as Broadcast News (1987), The Player (1992), and several titles by Mike Leigh. I feel the need to return to a previous column, to the anxiety of influence, and pivot to the aesthetic of influence—that of influencers whose job it is to be aspirational but relatable and to trigger more spending. What I get when I watch this film—and the same thing with the show—is that familiar feeling of scrolling, the feeling of comfort without excitement, sensation without emotion. So, while you can spot the romance plots from the Jane Austen adaptations and the underrated Far from the Madding Crowd (2015), the darkness filched from the Mike Nichols and P. T. Anderson titles, Materialists probably doesn’t have whatever has brought you back to any of these movies. It definitely doesn’t have Holly Hunter enjoying a controlled sob-fest (to be fair, most films don’t have this), and for me, it doesn’t have anything like it. 

Materialists turns out to be like the set of WLM: a nice place to visit, sure, and it’s not as if no one would want to live there. It’s that nobody does.