Gold Diggers of 2025: Celine Song explores the evolution of the marriage market in Materialists

In his book Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Stanley Cavell explores, through the glamour of 1930s Hollywood, the perception of marriage in screwball and romantic comedies. Tackling films like The Lady Eve, It Happened One Night and The Awful Truth, he examines marriage within modern parameters. When love becomes divorced from purely economic or religious motivations, what does marriage look like? Why, in the 21st century, would anyone get married?

The “comedy of remarriage” predates cinema by centuries. For Celine Song, the inspiration for her marriage-themed comedy Materialists is more deeply rooted in the more respectable realm of Jane Austen, with a hint of Nora Ephron. The film follows a professional matchmaker torn between the love of her life and the promise of striking gold with a rich husband. It’s a movie about love but also economics. Either deeply cynical, wildly romantic or merely realistic — the film has inspired a wide range of reactions on its view of the trials and tribulations of modern love. 

The title sums it up neatly: Materialists deals with the concrete materials of marriage. For Celine Song, this means the penthouses and the stacked bank accounts, but more crucially it also comes down to heirlooms and historical documents. Bookended by sequences with cave people, the film takes a historical anecdote about tools being passed from one area to another as an early sign of marriage. “This is all connected to the marriage records,” she explains via Zoom. “Every historian will tell you marriage records are the most profound and historical record in existence.”

What fascinates Song about this idea is the fact that it only tells part of the story. “The truth about it is that we may see these names of these two people lined up next to each other, but it doesn’t mean that we know what their marriage was actually like,” she says. “We don’t know what kind of love they shared. Maybe one of them was really a beautiful lifelong marriage. The other one was abusive and violent.”

The absurdity of love itself becomes central to the way Lucy navigates her work and life. Rather than relying merely on algorithms and apps, Lucy’s work as a matchmaker brings a human touch. Though she’s often dealing with lists of demands and requirements from her clients, what sets her work apart is an intangible je ne sais quoi. But as the film showcases, even her technique has its limits. Not everyone is what they seem to be, and getting what you want doesn’t always align with what you need. 

In Cavell’s book, he argues that in the modern era, the struggle of marriage is one of mutual love. Rather than simplifying matters, however, it only complicates things. How do we measure love? What does love even look like? As Song says, “the truth is that what is happening between two people is a completely divine thing. That is their own thing. It is not something that somebody else can own, and writing it down isn’t going to make it any more or less real.” Love doesn’t always mean harmony or peace or comfort, and for Lucy, the central conflict is centred on a desire for material things vs. the divine miracle of true love.

The centrality of this question is one rooted in choice. Song points out that for much of history, getting married was one of the few realms where women had power. “The marriage or dating market was the domain of women,” Song explains. “It was one of the few places where a woman had any power at all to make decisions about her life and her future, but it’s also the place where women felt like merchandise.”

The paradox of this dynamic remains at the heart of Materialists. Men treasure youth, beauty and class when choosing a mate. In one scene, Lucy breaks down the diminishing returns on her own beauty; at 35 years old, she’s running out of time. On the inverse, one of her clients, Sophie, refuses to be put in that binary. She tells Lucy, “I’m not merchandise. I’m a person.” In one of the darker threads of the film, Sophie plays a high price for the world of dating; someone might be perfect on paper, but that has little to do with the content of their real character. 

For Song, in some ways, the marriage market has become worse since the age of Austen. “I think that the objectification and the commodification of ourselves and each other are in some ways worse now, because in Pride and Prejudice, the marriage market is a community, right? It’s like a little town or something where it’s all gossip. They know their parents. The humanity of what these women are is something I still find very tangible. Now, in 2025, the marriage market is about the photoshopped image, the Botox face — we’re increasing our value as merchandise and then presenting it in a totally objectified way in profiles.”

At the heart of Song’s worldview is the idea that love itself is a miracle and, in many ways, the only real thing. “Which of course, as I say it, it’s like I’m crazy. I sound like I’m talking about Santa Claus. True Love,” she says, “feels like something children made up. It’s the greatest fantasy.” ■

Materialists is now playing in Montreal theatres.

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