To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

Act 2: A Class in Chemistry
Of course, all the emotional honesty in the world wouldn’t matter if TATBILB’s leads didn’t burn with chemistry. Sure, chemistry always matters, but in rom-coms it is a true Achilles’ heel. A script can be tight, the cinematography and editing top-notch, and the actors all accomplished, only for none of it to matter thanks to a lack of chemistry between the leads.

Fortunately, Lana Condor and Noah Centineo can get it. With each other, as any leads in a rom-com must, but also, in an equally critical way, with every single one of us in the audience. The two of them radiate charisma straight through the screen—Condor through her lively, secrets-spilling face, Centineo through his puckish, secrets-knowing smouldrin (a portmanteau of smoulder and grin I just made up, just for Centineo), and the both of them in the ways they look, just look at one another.

Condor and Centineo are undeniably the stars of the show, but TATBILB doesn’t rest on their charismatic laurels: Mahoro as Lucas is a foxy ball of friendliness; Madeleine Arthur as Lara Jean’s best (girl) friend, Chris, is just the wide-eyed punk weirdo she needs to be; Janel Parrish plays against type as the sweet and steel-spined Margot; Anna Cathcart steals every scene as Lara Jean’s meddling little sis, Kitty; and John Corbett plays the healthily engaged version of Kat Stratford’s single OBGYN dad with a discernible glee. (He’s got a car full of condoms, and he’s not afraid to share them.) The importance of Lara Jean and her sisters being half-Korean, and the majority of the cast (along with Mahoro) non-white, is hard to overstate—AwesomenessTV and Netflix were the only companies willing to bring Jenny Han’s heroine into the world as the first Korean-American teen rom-com idol—but it isn’t the most impressive thing about the cast by a long shot. In a genre that can so often see its characters lean too far into caricature, Lara Jean’s world is instead populated with teens—and through them, love—you can believe in.

Act 3: Aesthetic
The robustness of the TATBILB world goes beyond the core cast’s chemistry. Between Lara Jean’s covetable indie-girl wardrobe, the soundtrack’s never-ending stream of synthy, “the ’80s and ’90s had a 2018 baby” groove-bops, and the film’s overall color palette—a wash of blues, greens, aquamarines and creams cut through with saturated spots of goldenrod, crimson, and all varieties of pink—the whole thing is, as the internet says, a mood.

It is, however, in the cinematography that TATBILB’s mood blooms. Unlike chemistry, a romantic comedy can survive without sophisticated cinematography. Clueless has a memorable look, but few memorable shots. A Lot Like Love is a charm fest, but not because of any particularly bold cinematographic choices. When next-level cinematography is added to the rom-com formula, however—think, Amélie—the result can be outstanding. In TATBILB each shot set up by director Susan Johnson and cinematographer Michael Fimognari is composed like a painting. There’s the close-up of Lara Jean’s writing desk as she pens one of her love letters; the extreme close-up of Lara Jean and Lucas’s sneakers on either side of a bathroom stall divider as they talk about the letter he was sent; the high-angle wide shot as Lara Jean races to her closet to find her letter-stashing hatbox missing from its top shelf; the establishing long shot of Lara Jean on the lacrosse field as she steels herself to walk its length to confront Peter and engage his proffered fake-dating services; and another establishing long shot of Lara Jean and Peter again on the lacrosse field, walking hand-in-hand into the sunset. And I’m not talking just any painting—we’re talking Old Masters’ still life, a natura morta, complete with Caravaggio-esque tenebrism (a.k.a., real sick shadows and even sicker lights heightening emotional tension). I almost feel bad for all the teen rom-coms to come—it’s a lot to live up to.

Epilogue: A Genre Firmly Grasped
Ultimately, the fluency with which Johnson, Han, and screenwriter Sofia Alvarez speak “teen rom-com” allows them to take the fizzy conventions of the John Hughes films that Lara Jean loves, mix them all up with the 10 Things I Hate About Yous and the Cluelesses and the She’s All Thats that the outfits and soundtrack and PNW setting invoke, and send all their best bits and pieces through a machine that modernizes those elements even as it sweetens them to pure confection (yes, even the conflicts). Lara Jean and Peter get together because of a lie, sure, but their intentions toward each other are never anything but pure, and their reactions when trouble hits, never vicious. This sweetness works because, like Johnson et al., we in the audience know what shape rom-coms have historically taken, and are thus ready and able to have our expectations subverted in the purest of ways.

This, of course, sets another bar for the new Golden Age of the Teen Rom-Com, but future rom-rom filmmakers shouldn’t fret—To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before has left you a cheat sheet. All you need to remember is that we don’t need another round of lasciviousness, or selfishness, or petty resentment, or teenage revenge. We just need a wholesome Peter Kavinsky, asking his Lara Jean Covey not to break his heart.

Director: Susan Johnson
Writer: Sofia Alvarez
Starring: Lana Condor, Noah Centineo, Anna Cathcart, Janel Parrish, Israel Broussard, John Corbett
Release Date: August 17, 2018

Alexis Gunderson is a TV critic whose writing has appeared on Forever Young Adult, Screener, and Birth.Movies.Death. She’ll go ten rounds fighting for teens to be taken seriously as part of critical pop culture. She can be found @AlexisKG.