Over the last few years, we’ve had plenty of excellent filmmakers reckon with their own childhoods through more-or-less autobiographical dramas like Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, and Jonah Hill’s Mid90s. To this esteemed company we can now add young debut auteur Sean Wang’s Didi, another triumph for this shockingly solid mini-genre about a 13 year old boy in the summer between middle school and high school in 2008 that perfectly captures the anxiety, frustrations, and freedoms of being a bang-average teenage kid whose sense of self is in constant flux.
This kid is Chris (Izaac Wang), aka WangWang to his friends and DiDi to his Taiwanese mum (beautifully played by Joan Chen), who’s wiling away the summer making silly prank videos with his friends, but wants something more – from a possible romance with classmate Madi (Mahaela Park) to finding his potential calling as a skate videographer. Wang’s script is superb at capturing all the ways both you and your life suck as a 13 year old boy – Chris’s conversations with his mates are hilariously stupid but also deeply sad. Earnestness and feelings are suppressed in favour of cruel jokes and dismissiveness that are painfully familiar.
I’ve seen a lot written about how Didi is about growing up on the internet, and while that is a part of it (as someone who was themselves a 13 year old boy in 2008, the weird proto-social media anxieties and specific YouTube style of that era is perfectly recreated here), it’s really about the much more timeless problem of teenage boys being pathological liars. Chris, out of shame or anxiety or just because he’s bored, is constantly lying about his movie and music tastes, his talents, and even how Asian he is – lies that form an ever tightening web that adds an undercurrent of dread to what is a pretty low-stakes story.
It’s not a story that will hold any sort of surprises to anyone who has seen a Sundance Indie or coming-of-age movie before, but this added depth of fear is crucial to it working, a neat reflection of the more sensitive side that Chris refuses to let out. Unlike his braggadocious (and definitely lying) friends, he’s openly scared of sex, even kissing, and though he lacks the emotional capacity to admit it to himself, he’s distraught at the thought of his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) leaving for college.
Izaac Wang plays these notes really well, bringing a softness to an otherwise boldly spiky character – Chris is just as frequently mean-spirited, uncharismatic, or conversational dead weight, which is probably the most believable touch in any film about teenagers. Even if the whole thing was less moving and funny, I’d still find Didi a fascinating work just for the fact that it means my own teenagehood is finally far enough way that you can make a period piece about it, but Sean Wang has delivered a wonderfully *complete* film that surely spells big things for his future. At one point, Chris’s mum wonders if her son will ever thank her in his future Oscar speech – you have to imagine Sean Wang’s mum must be having those same thoughts now.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 