Celine Song defines a Celine Song Summer, as declared by Charli XCX

Everything is indeed romantic, including what it looks like to have a Celine Song Summer.

Charli XCX notably said goodbye to Brat Summer during her Coachella set earlier this year, ushering in a new it-girl season by shouting out a few filmmakers with highly anticipated releases this year. Among them: A Celine Song Summer ahead of the release of the Past Lives filmmaker’s Materialists, a soulful romance about a successful New York City matchmaker who is masterful at her job, but a bit inept when it comes to her own love life.

Brat Summer, inspired by Charli’s celebrated album Brat, had its own defining set of characteristics, including an open embrace of life’s chaos and one’s imperfections. So, what does a Celine Song Summer look like? Entertainment Weekly asked the auteur for her interpretation.

“I don’t know,” Song says, ruminating. “I feel like it’s probably one where you’re always going to be contending with the way that you feel, and then the romance of it in the middle of so much practical cynicism.”

She adds, “I think it’s so much about still believing in something after all the cynicism and all the difficulty. It’s really just about feeling something for another person.”

Song got a taste of Brat summer firsthand when she attended one of the pop star’s four sold-out shows at the Barclays Center in her native New York.

“It was amazing,” Song shares. “I got to meet her. It was just so cool. She’s the coolest. A really fun person to talk to, which isn’t always true of cool people, you know what I mean? Not every cool person is an amazing conversationalist, but she’s an incredible conversationalist.”

In Materialists, Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, a matchmaker with a pragmatic view on romance, who finds herself torn between two suitors: her ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a struggling actor, and the unicorn that is Harry (Pedro Pascal), a wealthy financier. An upsetting incident at work prompts Lucy to reconsider her career path and alters her perception of what it truly means to love.

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“What I believe more than anything is that the dream of true love, or the hope of it, the thing that’s really hard and humiliating and embarrassing to accept — it’s the bravest thing you can do,” Song says of the film’s resonant themes. “It’s really an examination, for me, of the way that we commodify ourselves. What Lucy has to learn is that she has to learn to love herself, too.”

Johnson has also called it a “story of bravery,” previously telling EW that “allowing yourself to be loved is scary, and really loving another person is scary. A woman having the courage to open her heart is what I loved about it.”

Materialists is in theaters Friday, meaning the Celine Song Summer begins effective immediately.