To All the Boys I've Loved Before · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A hand slides into a back pocket.

That's the shot everybody kept. Peter walks Lara Jean down a school hallway, puts his hand in her back pocket, and Susan Johnson holds it long enough for the gesture to settle into a picture. Michael Fimognari's camera doesn't chase it. Clean frame, soft light on the back of her hair. Staged for clarity, not for speed.

So look at the hand. What is it doing?

Two things at once, and the film refuses to choose. It's a performance for an audience of other teenagers, executing the terms of a written agreement between two people who are not together. It's also a boy touching a girl he likes. One gesture, two situations, no way to sort them.

Deleuze named that. In Cinema 1 he splits action films into two shapes. In the large form a whole situation presses down — a town under threat, a frontier — until someone acts and changes it. The small form runs the other way: the act comes first, small and ordinary, and from it you infer a situation you never see whole. He found its finest use in the comedy of manners, where a glance or a mislaid object gives away an entire marriage, and he called its sharpest sign the index of equivocity: an act that could belong to two different situations, leaving you to hold both.

Say "fake dating" and most people hear contrivance, a gimmick to be tolerated until the real feeling arrives. Here's the better description. The contract is a machine for manufacturing equivocity, and once it's running, every act in the film reads twice. That isn't a flaw in the premise. It's the premise. It's also why people rewatch this movie, and Netflix has said it's among its most rewatched originals: the second time you're not waiting to learn which meaning wins, you're watching both run at once, which is a pleasure the first viewing can't give you.

What starts the machine is an object misbehaving. Five letters, written precisely so they'd never be sent. A hatbox is where you keep the thing you've decided not to do. Deleuze calls an object that means by habit a mark: you see it, you know what follows. When one jumps its chain it becomes a demark, and interpretation has to start over. Lara Jean's letters get mailed. The whole plot is a single demark, and everything after it is the labor of reattaching a private object to a public world.

Meanwhile the film hands you something the characters don't have. You know, and they don't. The voice-over opens her interior to you, and the old joke of the confessional narrator (Clueless perfected it) is that she describes her own heart inaccurately while you watch it working. Deleuze's name for an image that means through a relation the viewer holds, rather than through what it shows, is the relation-image: thirdness, the audience as knowing third party. Dramatic irony is the popular name for the same thing. Romantic comedy is its great mass-cultural home, and this one is unusually disciplined about it. No winks. No cutaway to a friend who gets it. Just Lana Condor's face doing something her voice-over hasn't caught up to.

That face is the film's real special effect. Deleuze's affection-image isn't "a close-up of an emotion." It's a feeling held in the interval before it becomes an act, and he separates the face that reflects one steady quality from the face where small movements climb toward a threshold — the desiring face, the potisign. Condor plays the second almost continuously. Shyness in her hands isn't blankness; it's pressure with the lid on. Watch the hot-tub confession with that in mind and the scene changes shape. What's dramatic there isn't the words. It's a face arriving at its own limit.

Fimognari's presence is one of those crew decisions that quietly makes a film. He came out of horror: Flanagan's Oculus, Gerald's Game, The Haunting of Hill House. Horror trains a cinematographer to make you stare at a gap and feel it filling with something. He aims the same discipline at romance, and the gap he frames is the few inches between two people who haven't touched yet. Johnson's staging does the rest, with intimate two-shots and blocking that makes distance measurable. That's her specific invention and it's a real one. She also refuses the exit most teen movies take, the fantasy montage. The imagined stays inside ordinary rooms, carried by cutting so orderly you don't notice it — which is worth registering historically. Long after art cinema abandoned the sensory-motor link, the teen romance kept the movement-image running at full power without embarrassment.

Then there's the colour. The pastels aren't decoration. Deleuze would call this an absorbent colour-image: colour that takes the scene into itself instead of describing it. Lara Jean's imagination gets no separate dream space; it gets to tint everything, dusty pink and cream and honeyed backlight. Sofia Coppola shot The Virgin Suicides in that same honey to photograph girlhood as something already lost. Fimognari turns the light forward, toward a future somebody still wants.

One thing lives just outside all of it. The Covey house is built around a woman who isn't in it: Korean touchstones, a mother's presence held in objects. The film never stages a grief speech. It puts grief in the furniture, and the mother functions as an out-of-field, shaping every frame while belonging to none of them.

The debts are specific. Sixteen Candles built the grammar of the longing girl watching across a crowded room, the sympathetic reaction shot Johnson still runs on, and this film pointedly writes over that movie's Long Duk Dong with an actual Asian-American lead. Can't Buy Me Love supplied the literal contract. Pretty in Pink established the needle drop cued to feeling rather than to realism; Say Anything... gave permission to play it straight instead of cool. Clueless donated the narrator who misreads herself.

What it seeded is partly industrial and partly a matter of who gets to be at the center. Jenny Han spent years turning down producers who wanted Lara Jean's ethnicity changed, and the film exists in this form because she held. It landed weeks from Crazy Rich Asians. Its representational argument sits in the wallpaper instead of in a monologue, which is the harder version and the more durable one. It anchored a trilogy, Fimognari went on to direct both sequels, and it proved the mid-budget romance Hollywood had written off wasn't dead, only homeless.

Watch it again for the hands. The question the film is actually asking isn't whether they end up together. It's when a gesture stops being double.