The New Yorker:

A pair of recent films, Celine Song’s “Materialists” and Sean Baker’s “Anora,” turn the fairy tale on its head, with mixed results.

By Katy Waldman

At some point during our new Gilded Age, as the United States and the world have become more unequal, did Prince Charming die? His cohort of have-yachts have made themselves newly and counterproductively available to our imaginations, posting on social media, sometimes using their own platforms, their glamor dissipating with every bid for laughs or likes. A woman in want of blue-chip fantasy fodder can take her pick from a sickly crop of tech tycoons—Elon Musk, for example, might solicit her to bear one of his “legion” of children via I.V.F. Or perhaps she’d prefer to sign up for membership in the train wreck of the British Royal Family?

A spate of television and books scrutinizing the one per cent attests to the difficulty of romanticizing the pursuit of wealth, especially when it is coupled with the pursuit of love. In the first season of “The White Lotus,” a journalist who marries a Master of the Universe type is promptly labelled a trophy wife. None of the Roys’ intimate relationships in “Succession” beat the charges of opportunism. (Indeed, the purest and most passionate liaison on that show develops between Tom and Greg.) Morally compromised marriages of convenience are even a plot point in the Star Wars spinoff “Andor”: in order to secure funds for her revolutionary organizing, Senator Mon Mothma must pair off her daughter with the son of a scheming magnate.

“Materialists,” a new film by Celine Song, is the latest instance of this trend. The film unfolds in the world of high-end dating services and weddings that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a matchmaker for a boutique company called Adore, where she fields demands from absurdly choosy and unrealistic clients, who are not seeking a connection with another person so much as they are a designer accessory. Their relationship specifications are ludicrously precise: a man in his forties wants a mature twenty-seven-year-old; another man’s definition of “fit” is “nothing over twenty B.M.I.” and a woman’s least negotiable criterion is a high-six-figure salary at minimum.

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