Jenny Han’s widely successful To All the Boys YA series was, of course, always destined to be adapted into an according film trilogy. The tale of awkward yet charming Lara Jean Song-Covey (Lana Condor) was made for the teen angst genre that’s been fledgling ever since John Hughes disappeared from the spotlight (and then, unfortunately, died) and Emma Stone ditched the high school scene (i.e. the magnum opus that launched her, Easy A) in favor of more “adult” fare. In fact, Lara Jean is so much a neo-Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald) that Sixteen Candles naturally gets a nod in the first film, released in 2018, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. It is in this first Netflix installment (originally put out in book form in 2014) that Lara Jean strikes an accord with one of the five crushes she’s written a letter to (mailed out clandestinely by her younger, meddling sister, Kitty [Anna Cathcart]).
That “ex” crush being jock Peter Kavinsky (Noah Centineo), who tells her he’s flattered that she had such intense feelings during their spin the bottle kiss in seventh grade (for yes, this is what the letter recounts most specifically), but he’s only just freshly broken up with his long-time girlfriend, Gen (Emilija Baranac), the requisite cunt of a popular girl (even Caroline Mulford [Haviland Morris] had more of an empathy factor going for her) who once used to be best friends with Lara Jean before the social divide of high school came along–oh, and she had a crush on Peter at the time Lara Jean decided to take her turn at a kiss with him via the ironclad rules of spin the bottle.
Lara Jean can feel the ground beneath her spinning way more than any bottle when Peter approaches her on the track field to tell her it’s not going to happen between them. After fainting over the shock and embarrassment of the entire ordeal, panic washes over her anew at the sight of her older sister Margot’s (Janel Parrish) now ex-boyfriend (she dumped him just recently before going to college in Scotland), Josh (Israel Broussard), coming toward her with his own letter in hand to confront her about it. Mortified and knowing full well that any “next step” with Josh would be a complete and utter betrayal to Margot, Lara Jean decides to make a brash move: tackle Peter to the floor and kiss him passionately to make Josh go away. It works. Save for the fact that Peter is now more confused than ever. Yet clarity comes in the form of a scheming idea that can help both of them in their respective endeavors: pretend to date each other so Peter can make Gen jealous and Lara Jean can ensure that Josh thinks there are no residual feelings toward him.
Although Lara Jean has never had much experience (read: any) in the dating realm, she knows that in order to avoid messy emotional complications, there ought to be some rules put into place. Or rather, a handwritten “contract” on a piece of lined paper that stipulates they can’t kiss or do anything else physical. When Peter says that’s going to cause a lot of suspicion, Lara Jean offers, “Okay, you can put your hand in my back pocket.” He balks, “Hand in your back pocket? What the hell is that?” She replies, “It’s the opening scene to Sixteen Candles.” And yes, in addition to this Hughesian masterpiece, there are also noticeable elements of Robert Iscove’s She’s All That, with Lara Jean offering plenty to compare to Laney Boggs (Rachael Leigh Cook). Particularly during the necessary party scene wherein Peter takes her as his date (just the way Zach [Freddie Prinze Jr.] did with Laney), only to be flinched at by Gen, the Taylor Vaughan (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe) figure in this instance.
As time wears on, of course, Peter and Lara Jean’s feelings for one another become genuine, with the help of Sofia Alvarez’s script adaptation and Susan Johnson’s direction. But it would not be true love (especially by high school romance genre standards) without just a few more wrenches thrown into the situation. Like Lara Jean’s hot tub antics on the ski trip (how very Dawson’s Creek) going viral and Peter doing nothing to immediately quell the rumors about it. The problems between them are further explored in the second installment, To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, in which the receipt of her fifth letter to John Ambrose McClaren (Jordan Fisher), a more bookish, political science-oriented crush, finds Lara Jean questioning if maybe she jumped into things too quickly with Peter, especially when she finds out that John Ambrose is also volunteering at the same retirement home for his community service hours.
This time directed by Michael Fimognari (who will also round out the film series with To All the Boys: Always and Forever, Lara Jean–with a script from Katie Lovejoy), the conflicted emotions Lara Jean feels throughout the narrative is classic teen drama–as evidenced so many times before in the illustrious love triangles of Angela, Jordan and Brian on My So-Called Life; Joey, Dawson and Pacey on Dawson’s Creek; Daria, Jane and Tom on Daria; Sabrina, Harvey and Nick on Chilling Adventures of Sabrina–and so on and so forth. It is quite simply the crux of what makes a teen film tick to the natural rhythm of its three-act structure. Concluding with a scene in a “field” (“I’d always fantasized about falling in love in a field, but I just never thought it’d be the kind where you played lacrosse”) at the end of the first movie à la Juno, the second one brings things full-circle in this type of milieu as well, with the swelling sound of Marina’s original composition for the movie, “About Love,” punctuating a stylized moment that has been used many times before (in both season one, episode five of Sex and the City and Guy Ritchie’s Swept Away): the illusion of “floating on air.”
And as Marina croons, “I don’t really know a lot about love, a lot about love/But you’re in my head, you’re in my blood/And it feels so good, it hurts so much,” even the most cynical and wizened of us can feel a bit of a rush. Incidentally, Marina also noted after writing the song, “I really want to write music for films more. Or conceptual projects outside of album formats. (Preferably for John Waters films).” Indeed, John Waters explores the phase of love that inevitably comes after all the warmth and fuzziness: taint. Maybe Lara Jean’s epistolary fetish will bring a bit more of that in whatever the third installment holds. But how can she really be accused of philandering when, in comparison to the norm for dudes “playing the field,” she at least has the decency to tailor each of her affections for them from a cerebral standpoint? That’s what makes a woman a much more thoughtful and effective Casanova (for men, much as they pretend not to be, are suckers when it comes to women going for their emotional jugular). Or is it “Song-Covey” in this case?
