Agalia Tan

What I’m in search of is maybe hard to explain in a neat sentence, but, maybe, it’s some sense of resonance. You know when you’re reading and you’re like “Oh, this person is saying this thing I’ve been thinking or feeling forever, but didn’t know how to express in words?” That’s a beautiful feeling when you can see yourself more clearly through som... See more

“I believe that love is the greatest mystery in everyone’s lives, and therefore it is one of the most important themes in cinema. Love is the one drama we all experience, and it deserves the utmost respect.”

“People call romantic films ‘chick flicks’ as a way to diminish them, which I find unspeakably sad, not just for the way it excludes ‘chicks’ from the realm of ‘serious people,’ but also for the way it excludes ‘serious people’ from the realm of romance and love.

Lucy finds herself torn between the cynicism and mathematical practicality her job has hardened in her and a yearning romanticism she wishes she could be open to.

"It's really upsetting to me that what happened to the way that we talk about feminism, the way that we talk about being a person and a woman. It's become that now people are going to judge each other for how much money they make. What happened? We actually think that being a billionaire is not entirely an immoral thing? What happened to the Occupy... See more

We live in a world where young women talk openly on social media platforms about how to get men to send you money, how to find a sugar daddy, activities with a veneer of romance that both parties know are actually centered on money. But even for women who are determined to earn their own money, there’s little shyness left.

a post-90s dynamic in dating: the commodification of people on dating apps, just another place to find made-to-order goods. The matchmaking service that Lucy provides does much the same thing, filtering out and matching candidates by numbers on a spreadsheet: age, weight, height, income. Characters constantly talk about feeling valuable, which here... See more

Song has said that although she embraces the escapism inherent in the genre, she included the concrete figure quite deliberately, prodding audiences to talk about money openly even if culturally it’s still considered impolite. “Let’s be realistic about that: It’s not polite to people who don’t want you to know how much money they have,”

Nobody talks salary in rom-coms — or really in movies at all. That’s probably in part to avoid dating a film too much. But it’s also because concrete numbers are startling, even distracting. Suddenly you’re tabulating Lucy’s lifestyle, trying to conjure up a mental balance sheet. And for “Materialists,” money is in every frame, in a way we’ve rarel... See more