Oooh! What does THAT button do?
We have now reached the era where the up-and-coming filmmakers are younger than me, and so the autobiographical coming-of-age period pieces take place later than my own experience. This is scary. I demand that time slow down! Even if it contains a slightly more advanced social media landscape than existed when I was a freshman in high school, Didi’s mid-2000s contours are deeply recognizable and rendered with touching, painful honesty (I just experienced them at age 18 rather than 13).
What makes Didi stand out is not just the usual retrospective totems — clothes, music, slang, etc. — but the cultural shift that occurred as computer and digital devices became the backbone of socialization. Between this, Eighth Grade, and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, it’s clear that our new coming-of-age filmmakers have a deep understanding of how adolescents use screens as a filter and a mask to their inner selves and personal identities. That, more than any of the other production specifics, is what make Didi feel so true and fresh. In the past, even the good teen films that prominently included social media and captured devices as a central part of the teenage experience (like Do Revenge) — let alone the bad ones (like Status Update) — used it more as a mechanical, story-driving detail rather than a new schema for interacting with people, which is what it truly is.
Didi, the second film by Sean Wang following documentary Nai Nai & Wai Po, is very clearly inspired by Eighth Grade, specifically. We see this in the age and maturity level of the protagonist, still more child than adolescent, as well as the brutally awkward, cringe-inducing scenarios depicted. Here, the central figure is a thirteen-year old Taiwanese-American boy from Fremont, California (Izaac Wang). This character’s name, and how that reflects his shifting and complex identity, is the matter of much investigation: His family calls him Didi, a Chinese term for “little brother”; his middle school friends call him Wang Wang; his new friends call him Chris. We’ll go with “Chris” for this review.
It’s 2008, the summer before Chris’s freshman year. He lives with his mother, grandmother, and sister — making him the only “man” in the house. (His father is in Taiwan for unexplained career reasons, sending money home.) He and his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), about to head off to college, do not get along in the slightest. His mom, an artist named Chungsing (Joan Chen), is torn between letting Chris find his own path and laying down the law; the latter impulse coming to the fore, especially, when Chungsing’s Chinese friends brag about their kids’ GPA, SAT tutoring, and prestigious extracurriculars. Chris, by contrast, mostly dicks around with his friends making dumb videos and posting them to nascent YouTube. Chris’s grandmother (credited as “Nai Nai,” a Chinese term for paternal grandmother) (Chang Li Hua — Sean Wang’s actual grandmother) nags Chungsing to rule her kids with more of an iron fist, too.
Chris does not make matters any easier for himself. He frequently lies and reshapes his personality when he encounters a new person or social situation. He draws the attention of his crush, Madi (Mahaela Park), in part by pretending to like the things she likes, including movies he’s never seen. (And, to be fair, who among us did not do this to some level in middle and high school?) When he meets some friendly older skaters, he fabricates his racial identity because he thinks he’ll seem more normal, and he exaggerates his filmmaking skills to convince them to let him film their stunts.
What really makes Didi work is the precision of its incidents and emotions. None of this is especially broad portraiture or observation or gags; it’s all in the minute details. The way that Chris repeats the word “bitch” used playfully from one girl to another a few minutes earlier, at the worst possible moment, for example, is an absolute dagger. The attempt to refine your personality through clumsy Google searches — “how to be a skate filmer” — rings so true to some of my high school and college memories. Chris is captured by Wang with quiet vulnerability but deep, off-putting flaws that make you simultaneously mortified and sympathetic.
Wang’s filmmaking is conventional for the indie coming of age drama, but quite effective in that paradigm. There’s a slight khaki tint to the look, a borderline grunginess that grows darker across the runtime. It’s mostly the familiar soft-focus, close-up heavy shots, but it works so well at getting us in the heads of the characters. One important touch executed by Wang is the use of computer screens: pausing cursors and clicked buttons offer some of the film’s powerful moments.
The film’s third act takes a shift towards Chris’s mother Chungsing. Between this, Turning Red, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Joy Ride, we’ve seen a bunch of movies from the past few years across a huge variety of tones made by Asian-American creators with perspectives on immigrant parents that start jaded and shift towards sympathetic, their closing acts deep expressions of love for complex parental figures. Chen gives an excellent, touching performance.
This is a really terrific coming-of-age film, though it’s got a few bumps. Some of the plotting is too episodic and blocky: The subplot of Chris’s friendship with the skaters, in particular, vanishes abruptly and without consequence. Chris’s newfound confidence and contentment at the end of the film are a bit too fully-formed and pat to be believable.
I also wonder how audiences will react to every character being an ambivalent portrait: Madi is neither a romantic savior nor an antagonist. The skaters are generous and inclusive, but only to a point. Chris’s friends Soup (Aaron Chang) and Fahad (Raul Dial) are simultaneously petulant and sweet in that 13-year-old-boy sort of way. Personally, I loved the characterization; almost everyone is human and multidimensional.
It’s another outstanding coming-of-age film over a year or two that’s had some really memorable and serious pieces of filmmaking in the genre: Falcon Lake, Gasoline Rainbow, Snack Shack, etc. Didi is not quite a masterpiece, but it’s a worthy entry to the canon and a promising outing in a genre that is increasingly indebted to the sharp, cringey character portraits from the late 2010s like Lady Bird and Eighth Grade.
Is It Good?
Very Good (6/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.
2 replies on “Didi (2024)”
“to be fair, who among us did not do this to some level in middle and high school”
I know somebody in her thirties who sure acted as if she enjoyed film musicals a lot more than it turns out she actually does. -_-
I dunno how obnoxiously pedantic I’m being about this, probably a 6 out of 10 on the scale (7 or 8 if you already know this and were writing around it), but didi and nainai are familial nouns. (E.g., Baba went to Taiwan, mama stayed, nainai helps out, didi stews in adolescence, and jiejie doesn’t like him. Whereas if Chris were older, he’d be gege, but if Chris’s curious T-shirt were indicative, he’d be meimei.)
Have no idea how gege/didi and jiejie/meimei work in families with more than two children of the same gender, and in my brief investigation have somehow learned more (with the appropriate grain of salt, but I don’t think it’ll ever be knowledge I have to personally apply anyway) about how “gege” is used by Chinese-speaking straight women and in the Chinese-speaking gay community.
Not too pedantic at all, thanks for clarifying that. I inferred they were family nouns as I watched the film, then forgot so in the day between when I watched it and when I wrote the review. I have a Chinese sister-in-law, and my daughter learns Chinese in school and has taught me a few words, so I should have caught it. I’ve reworded the portions where I introduced those terms.
I’m starting to think I tricked myself into liking horror movies so I’d get more out of Alternate Ending’s podcast and Tim’s reviews. It’s the film fan equivalent, I guess.