Oh, to be young and live in 2008.
Movies tend to over-romanticize coming-of-age stories, but Dìdi dispels the myth that you magically grow up and have it all figured out in less than two hours. Instead, it sticks to the harsh, uncomfortable, painful (and humorous) truths of adolescence, which is what makes it such a powerful, universal story.
Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) is preparing for high school and has no idea who he is or where he fits in the world. He has a whole group of friends, but he doesn’t have a deep connection with any of them. He has a crush on a girl but doesn’t know how to talk to her. He hates his sister, who is about to go to college, and he can barely stand his mother. Basically, he’s like a lot of 13-year-old boys growing up in America.
Taking inspiration from his own youth, writer-director Sean Wang takes that blank canvas and starts adding details. Chris, who goes by Wang Wang, is a Chinese-American who lives with his grandmother (Chang Li Hua), mother Chungsing (Joan Chen) and sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) while his father works in Taiwan, halfway around the world. The film is set in Fremont, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s 2008, a more carefree era of the Internet, when MySpace still existed and online conversations were conducted on AIM. Paramore and Superbad are big.
Chris has a lot of fear, but like most things he encounters, he doesn’t know what to do with it or how to channel it. So he internalizes most of it, which manifests itself in him being silent, aloof, and almost invisible to the world and people around him. He tries to learn to skate and joins a group of skateboarders by posing as a cameraman, despite having almost no experience with a camcorder. His attempts to flirt with the love of his life, Madi (Mahaela Park), fail because his self-consciousness keeps getting in the way.
Director Wang, who was nominated for an Oscar for his 2023 short film “Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó,” has a lot of sympathy for Chris, but he doesn’t make him into a superhero. Chris isn’t cool or secretly cool, he’s just a kid figuring things out for himself, usually the hard way. And it’s never easy, but because of the structure he has around him — whether he realizes it or not — he’ll be fine. He’ll figure things out when it’s time to figure them out, on his own terms, at his own pace. (He’s like a spiritual cousin of Kayla Day, the main character in Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade.”)
“Dìdi” mixes bursts of humor with moments of great sincerity, and Wang — who perfectly nails the film’s late-2000s setting details — thickens the story by rounding out the character of Chungsing, an amateur painter who has given up her own dreams to raise her family. Chris and his mother fall on hard times, but they bond over a meal at McDonald’s, and it’s in these small, tender moments that Wang’s compassion and humanity shine through. And that’s what makes “Dìdi” resonate more strongly and deeply than just another coming-of-age story.
“Dìdi” – This is the new version of the film.
Grade: A-
Age rating R: due to persistent language, sexual content and drug and alcohol use – all involving teenagers
Running time: 93 minutes
In cinemas
