Like a Film: Anna and the French Kiss — The Cinematic YA Novel
Stephanie Perkins's Anna and the French Kiss was published in December 2010 by Dutton Books and became one of the defining YA romances of its decade — a novel so frequently recommended, so reliably beloved, and so ostentatiously cinematic in its construction that its continued absence from screens is a minor mystery of the adaptation landscape. The book has Paris, a slow-burn romance between people who ought to be together long before the novel allows them to be, a protagonist whose explicit interest in film criticism gives every movie reference a structural purpose, and dialogue that reads, in its best exchanges, like a screenplay draft that has been allowed to breathe into something longer. It should have been adapted years ago. It has not been.
The "Like a Film" series examines books through the lens of what they would look like on screen — not merely as a speculative entertainment but as a way of understanding what the book is doing with its medium. Analyzing a novel as a potential film reveals what is structural rather than incidental about its appeal: what is purely textual (internal monologue, free indirect style, the specific sensuousness of prose description) and what is visual and dramatic and might survive the translation. In the case of Anna and the French Kiss, the analysis is particularly revealing because the book is so self-consciously cinematic and yet, in ways that matter, so thoroughly a novel.
Anna Oliphant is seventeen, has been accepted to Georgia College to study film, and has spent years building a serious knowledge of cinema — she writes reviews on a personal website, goes to see multiple films per week, and has a critical vocabulary that the narrative deploys with casual fluency. When her father, a James Patterson-style commercial novelist whose literary ambitions slightly exceed his critical self-awareness, ships her off for her senior year at the School of America in Paris (known as SOAP), her film-critic sensibility becomes both a coping mechanism and a lens through which the city is filtered. Paris is, partly, a film set she is perpetually analyzing.
Étienne St. Clair arrives early: half-French, half-English, raised in California, with an accent that shifts by language, a girlfriend named Ellie, and a charm that the novel registers as immediately and helplessly visible. The central machinery of the plot is the question of whether Anna and St. Clair's friendship — which is real, warm, and mutual — can survive the acknowledgment of what it actually is, given that St. Clair has a girlfriend and that Anna's previous romantic experience has prepared her inadequately for the specific complexity of loving someone who is already with someone else.
The Cinematic Qualities of the Source Material
The novel's cinematic viability is not accidental — Perkins writes in a visual, scene-based mode that is unusually well-suited for screen translation. The majority of narrative information is delivered through dialogue and action rather than internal monologue, and the internal monologue that does exist tends to track observations about what Anna sees rather than extended reflections about how she feels. This is the inverse of the problem that makes many psychological YA novels difficult to adapt: the knowledge that a character is in love, in fear, or in grief is conveyed through behavioral detail rather than thought-report.
Paris itself contributes significantly to this visual quality. The novel is set in specific, named locations: Montmartre, the Sacré-Cœur, Père Lachaise cemetery, the area around the Panthéon in the 5th arrondissement, the cinemas of the Latin Quarter. Perkins researched the city specifically before writing it, and the locations are not merely atmospheric — they carry narrative weight. The Sacré-Cœur scene is a turning point; the Père Lachaise visit is a character-revealing excursion; the cinema visits structure Anna's private life in Paris even as the SOAP social world structures her public one. A screenwriter working from this material would find that the visual architecture is already substantially in place.
The novel's pacing is also cinematically intelligent. Romantic tension is built not through extended soliloquies but through sequences of proximity and withdrawal: scenes in which St. Clair and Anna are physically close, in which something is about to happen and then doesn't, in which words that could mean something or could mean nothing hang between them. This is the grammar of the romantic comedy and the romantic drama both, and it translates directly because it is already scene-based rather than thought-based.
"Paris is, partly, a film set Anna is perpetually analyzing. The irony of the novel being unfilmed is that its protagonist would have something specific to say about why."
— Novel Sounds editorialWhy It Hasn't Been Adapted
Sony Pictures optioned the rights to Anna and the French Kiss in 2013, three years after publication, when the novel had already built a substantial readership and before the YA adaptation wave of the mid-2010s had peaked. The option did not result in a production. The project appears to have stalled at development stage, which is where the majority of optioned properties remain indefinitely.
Several structural factors likely contributed. Paris location filming — or the studio work required to convincingly simulate Paris — carries a production cost that contemporary YA romance does not always justify. The comparison to To All the Boys I've Loved Before, Netflix's 2018 adaptation of Jenny Han's novel, is instructive: that film was shot in Vancouver with minimal location filming, and its appeal did not depend substantially on its suburban American setting. An Anna and the French Kiss adaptation would face a different calculus. Paris is not incidental to the book's appeal — it is central. A Paris that looks like Vancouver would betray the source material in a way that a generic suburban backdrop for a different generic suburban story would not.
The slow-burn structure also presents adaptation challenges. The novel is approximately 370 pages and uses most of that length to build and defer the central relationship. A 95-minute romantic comedy typically has a three-act structure in which the romantic obstacle is established, developed, and resolved in a compressed timeframe. The compression required to fit Anna and St. Clair's full arc into a film-length runtime would require either the obstacle (St. Clair's girlfriend Ellie) to be resolved earlier than the novel resolves it, or the third act to feel rushed. Neither outcome is satisfying. The novel's length is structural rather than decorative; the time it takes is doing the work of making the resolution feel earned.
What Kind of Film It Would Make: Comparisons and Context
The clearest comparisons in the recent YA adaptation landscape are Netflix's To All the Boys trilogy and the more recent The Kissing Booth series, both of which occupy a similar tonal register: contemporary, dialogue-driven, American teen romance with a light touch and significant cultural visibility. Both were produced at streaming-native budgets and found their audiences without theatrical distribution.
A Netflix or streaming production of Anna and the French Kiss would likely follow this model — the book's audience is now primarily a streaming audience, and the economics of theatrical YA romance are difficult outside of major franchise properties. The question is whether a streaming production would commit to genuine Paris filming or work around it. Films like Midnight in Paris (Allen, 2011) and An American in Paris (Minnelli, 1951) demonstrate that Paris-as-location is commercially and aesthetically distinctive; the city photographs in ways that communicate character and atmosphere efficiently. A streaming production committed to location work would have both a competitive differentiator and a production challenge to manage.
In tone and register, the film would sit closest to the Netflix romantic comedies of the late 2010s rather than to the earnest pathos of The Fault in Our Stars or the action-adjacent energy of The Hunger Games. Casting would be the central creative challenge. St. Clair requires an actor who can be effortlessly charming without appearing to try, convincingly multilingual in his identity if not literally in the film, and specific enough physically — the novel describes him as shorter than conventionally expected for a romantic lead — to avoid the generic conventionality that diminishes many YA love interests in adaptation. Anna requires a protagonist who can carry extensive internal monologue translated into behavioral performance: an actor who communicates intelligence and self-doubt simultaneously.
Paris on Page and Screen: What the Translation Costs
The specific loss in translating Anna and the French Kiss to screen is the texture of Anna's developing relationship with Paris as a city rather than as a backdrop. In the novel, her initial fear of the city — she speaks no French, has never been abroad, and arrives in a state of resentment toward her father — gives way gradually to a genuine affiliation. This development is conveyed through accumulation: repeated visits to the same cinema on the Rue Champollion, the gradual mastery of the Métro system, the progressive extension of her social world beyond the SOAP campus into the actual fabric of the city.
Film cannot accumulate in quite this way — the repeated visit is compressed into a montage or suggested through a single scene. The specific intimacy of place that Perkins builds through duration is precisely what a film's runtime works against. What film can do instead is operate through image: through the specific quality of light on a Montmartre morning, the visual rhythm of the Sacré-Cœur steps, the particular combination of grandeur and neighborhood that characterizes the Latin Quarter. These are substitutions, not equivalences, but they are available to a director who understands the novel's investment in its city.
The cinema references that run through the novel — Anna's reviews, her frame of reference for what she is experiencing — would require creative adaptation rather than direct translation. A film that had Anna reviewing other films would risk meta-textual disorientation; the device might be translated into her keeping a notebook, or into visual sequences that render her critical sensibility through image rather than written commentary. The structural function of her film criticism — it marks her as a serious observer of the world she is inhabiting, not merely a participant — would need to survive even if the specific mechanism changed.
The Anna Trilogy as a Whole
Perkins's two companion novels — Lola and the Boy Next Door (San Francisco, 2011) and Isla and the Boy Next Door (Paris, 2014) — follow different central couples in different settings, with Anna and St. Clair appearing as supporting presences in both. The question of whether all three would work as a film anthology is, in part, a question about whether the social world Perkins constructs across the trilogy has enough connective tissue to sustain the franchise structure that studios require to justify repeated production investment.
The honest answer is probably not: the three novels share a tonal register and a structural template but have very different settings and characters, and the brief cameos by earlier protagonists in later books are pleasures for existing readers rather than plot architecture. A Lola adaptation would have to stand on its own, as Anna would, and the overlap between books is not sufficient to function as sequel-level continuity. What the trilogy does offer is a coherent vision of a particular kind of YA romance — intelligent, Paris-and-city-adjacent, built on friendship before romance — that could sustain a series of standalone adaptations at the register Netflix has demonstrated an appetite for.
Frequently Asked Questions
As of 2026, no film adaptation has been produced. Film rights were optioned by Sony Pictures in 2013 but the project did not move into active production. The book remains one of the most widely read YA romances without a screen version — a situation that has attracted comment given its cinematic Paris setting and dialogue-driven structure.
Anna and the French Kiss follows Anna Oliphant, a seventeen-year-old aspiring film critic from Atlanta, who is sent for her senior year to the School of America in Paris. There she meets Étienne St. Clair — charming, half-French, half-English, with an existing girlfriend — and the novel traces the slow development of their friendship into something more. The book's appeal rests substantially on its Paris setting, its slow-burn romantic tension, and Anna's voice as a film-literate observer of her own situation.
Stephanie Perkins is an American YA author whose Anna Trilogy — Anna and the French Kiss (2010), Lola and the Boy Next Door (2011), and Isla and the Boy Next Door (2014) — established her as one of the defining voices in contemporary YA romance. She also edited two YA horror anthologies: My True Love Gave to Me (2014) and There's Someone Inside Your House (2017), the latter adapted for Netflix in 2021.
To All the Boys I've Loved Before (Netflix, 2018) is the closest structural comparison — both are contemporary YA slow-burn romances with clear leads and specific settings. The key difference is that Anna's appeal depends substantially on Paris, which requires actual or convincing location work and significantly higher production costs. To All the Boys was shot in Vancouver against a generic suburban backdrop; an Anna adaptation cannot make the same substitution without betraying the source material.
Key locations include the area near the Panthéon and the Rue Soufflot in the 5th arrondissement (where the fictionalized school is set), Montmartre and the Sacré-Cœur (site of a significant scene between Anna and St. Clair), Père Lachaise cemetery, the Palace of Versailles, and the cinemas of the Latin Quarter — particularly the Rue Champollion arthouse cinema strip. Anna's relationship with the city tracks her emotional development, with location visits serving narrative as well as atmospheric functions.
The Anna Trilogy consists of Anna and the French Kiss (Paris, 2010), Lola and the Boy Next Door (San Francisco, 2011), and Isla and the Boy Next Door (Paris, 2014). Each novel is a standalone romance with a different central couple, set in a distinct city, with characters from earlier books appearing briefly in later ones. All three follow a similar structural template of friendship developing into romance against a specific obstacle.
Several factors are likely: Paris location filming adds significant production cost; the novel's slow-burn structure (built over ~370 pages) presents pacing challenges for a 95-minute runtime; and the YA adaptation market of 2013–2016 focused on dystopian franchise properties rather than contemporary romance. The Netflix wave of YA romantic comedy adaptations in the late 2010s arrived after the Sony option had lapsed, and the project has not re-emerged in public development.
Cinematic viability in YA adaptation depends on: a protagonist whose internal life translates into active visual storytelling rather than internal monologue; a scene-based narrative structure with clear dramatic turning points; a visually specific setting; and a central relationship dramatizable through dialogue and action. Anna and the French Kiss scores well on all these criteria — it is unusually dialogue-rich, scene-based, and visually specific compared to most YA romance, with internal monologue that tracks observation rather than extended emotional reflection.
The closest recent comparisons are Netflix's To All the Boys I've Loved Before trilogy, The Half of It (2020), and Alex Strangelove (2018) — streaming-native contemporary YA romances with dialogue-driven pacing and specific settings. The tone is warmer and lighter than The Fault in Our Stars or Everything, Everything. With actual Paris location filming, an Anna adaptation would have a visual distinctiveness that most streaming YA romance lacks.