This is the brief and unexpected opening of Celine Song’s Materialists, a prologue that announces a certain loftiness in the film’s premise. Or in spite of it, as a sudden cut flings us into the classic opener of many a millennial rom-com: the cosmopolitan heroine at her vanity,

A lmost a decade before she made her filmmaking debut with the swooning, Oscar-nominated drama Past Lives in 2023, writer-director Celine Song found herself in an impossible quand

By this metric alone, Celine Song’s “Materialists” is something else entirely. Song’s characters tell us bluntly what their salary is, or how much their apartment costs. Economic reality, in fact, drives the narrative.