To All the Boys series

(Netflix Streaming, December 2021) Romantic comedies should not have sequels. They cheapen the climax of the previous film, break the illusion of a happily ever after and often simply drag on meaningless romantic tension longer than it should. Now that Netflix is getting into the YA romance genre, it’s also greenlighting adaptation of trilogies and what’s the point of that? Still, there are always exceptions and while To all the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You may have the year’s most unwieldy title, it’s also an interesting argument in favour of romance sequels. As you may recall from the previous film, our story picks up soon after our very likable high-school heroine’s first romantic kiss. But given the age and inexperience of the protagonist, there’s a lot of ground to cover — indecision, jealousy, new romantic prospects and more! For older viewers, there’s something half exasperating, half endearing about the way our protagonist overcomplicates relationship questions that older people have learned to deal with: for high-schoolers, everything is new and fresh and extreme and terrifying and that’s perhaps the part of the film that works best as a sequel. Free of the origin story of the characters, To all the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You is free to poke at the complications that come after the romantic climax. Some of the material is overdone, obviously: the heroine’s lack of maturity can be irritating and the contrivances put in her way often veer into the melodramatic. Still, much of the film’s ability to overcome those issues stems from some decent writing and a sympathetic protagonist played by Lana Condor. The flip-side of that is that if you’re not already invested in the characters, it’s going to be a much longer sit. Still, it works in spite of my prejudices against romantic sequels. (But not all Netflix YA romantic sequels-in-a-trilogy are made alike — if you want something worse, there’s always The Kissing Booth 2.)