Sean Wang’s Sundance sensation Dìdi is a gorgeously told tale of growing up in the late noughties. Here’s our review.
Sean Wang’s Dìdi does something rather miraculous. It manages to capture a sense of a very specific time with its details while also telling a universal coming-of-age story from a unique point of view. If you grew up in the 2000s, listened to Paramore and spent your afternoons watching Youtube videos, this is a film for you.
Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) is a teenager growing up in California in 2008. He spends his free time skateboarding and causing mayhem with his friends while harbouring a crush on schoolmate Madi and worrying about how to kiss girls. Coming from a Taiwanese-American family, Chris is constantly pulled in different directions by the two cultures and identities.
In many ways, Dìdi feels almost like a prequel to Bo Burnham’s excellent Eight Grade. Both films recreate the precise awkwardness of being a teenager without ever making fun of it. Sure, Dìdi is a very funny film, but its humour never comes across as cruel. Dìdi not only revives those familiar feelings of being a teenager, but also encapsulates what it felt like to grow up just as the World Wide Web was becoming as huge as it is now. Most of Dìdi could have been plucked from my own teenage years, and I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one who feels that way.
We watch as Chris googles how to kiss girls, ultimately practising on an apple segment ā it’s okay, we’ve all been there ā and posts prank and skateboarding videos on YouTube while pranking his friends to go on a very inappropriate website that features the male appendage. Director Wang is also very adept at portraying the tumultuous adolescent friendships, especially between boys. All the banter in the film feels authentic and appropriate without being overly performative or not fitting into the mouths of the exceptional young actors.
While Izaac Wang is the film’s heart and it truly is a wonderful performance, a special mention should go to Joan Chen who does so much with so little as Chris’ mother. There are some really beautiful nuances in the family dynamics in Dìdi; Chris is worried his mum isn’t proud of him because he aspires to be a”filmer”, but also witnesses his Nai Nai, his grandmother, constantly berating Chen’s softly spoken Chungsing.
There’s a beautiful scene in which Chris wonders if his family is ashamed of him. It’s reminiscent of Greta Gerwig’s seminal Lady Bird in which the titular character asks her mother if she likes her. Both scenes feel disarmingly honest and authentic; we often wonder how our parents see us and whether they’re just forced to love us because they brought us into the world.
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While on the surface, Dìdi is an ubiquitous look at the growing pains of the early 2000s, Wang also weaves in more specific experiences of growing up as Asian-American. “You’re pretty cute, for an Asian” one character notes and it hits like a dagger in the ribs. There’s something affecting in the way director Wang manages to weave in such universal, lived-in experiences of every teenager around the world while also touching on some clearly very painful memories.
Dìdi isn’t the first film to juxtapose the pains of growing up with skateboarding. Skate Kitchen, Mid-90s and Bing Liu’s excellent documentary Minding The Gap did the same, but the metaphor hasn’t grown tired. To Dìdi’s advantage, director Wang retains a sense of child-like playfulness and the film has a few whimsical, winning stylistic flourishes.
Dìdi, along with films like The Farewell and Minari, manages to blend the universal with the culturally specific and create an all-embracing, joyous hybrid. Dìdi is a small wonder of a film, sensitive, playful and above all, relatable. It is, without a doubt, one of the best films of the year.
Dìdi is in UK cinemas 2nd August.
