To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You (2020)

To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You arrives as the second installment in a Netflix trilogy built on love letters and a fake romance that turned real. Lara Jean and Peter have survived the contract and now confront the more delicate problem of a boy who answered one of her letters and happens to volunteer at the same retirement home. The film is amiable, soft-lit, and entirely committed to the rhythms of the teen romance. It also happens to be cast with a warmth and range that mainstream teen comedies rarely assemble: an Asian-American lead, a multiracial supporting circle, Black and South Asian performers in the margins. The film never points at any of this. It proceeds as though a diverse school is a normal fact of American life, which it is. A gay friend named Lucas appears in the margins, charming and unexamined, his sexuality registered only by his existence.

The emotional center is a young woman's interiority, and here the film is sincere without being loud. Lara Jean spends much of the runtime anxious about the ex-girlfriend Gen, comparing herself to a prettier, more polished rival, and the resolution arrives in a quiet conversation between the two girls. That is progress of a modest, unspoken kind. It stops short of any argument about gender politics. Race is never a subject of conversation or conflict; the film is colorblind to a fault. Class, climate, body image, and neurological difference are all absent from the frame. Nobody lectures. Nobody preaches. The moral instruction budget is spent entirely on telling teenage girls to be honest with their boyfriends.

The result is a pleasant confection with little agenda beyond a warm evening of streaming. Its cultural awareness lives in the casting and almost nowhere else, which makes for a strange, gentle artifact. A film can be diverse and also be about nothing much. This one is.