‘Didi’ Is the Next Great Coming-of-Age Film
Adolescence sucks, and Didi, which hits theaters on July 26, captures its ups and downs with a humor that often elicits as many tears as laughs. The story of a Taiwanese-American teen whose summer before high school is filled with personal, familial, and romantic dilemmas for which he’s frequently ill-equipped to handle, writer/director Sean Wang’s directorial debut (winner of the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award and Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble Cast at January’s Sundance Film Festival) is a kindred spirit to Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade—a superb coming-of-age saga that lives in the intersection of youthful euphoria, despair, insecurity, irresponsibility, and fearlessness.
Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) is known as “Didi” to his mom and “Wang Wang” to his pals, the latter of whom are by his side during a VHS-recorded introductory scene in which they blow up a mailbox and then giddily flee its furious owner. The year is 2008 and Chris spends most of his days and nights with his friends Fahad (Raul Dial) and Jimmy (Aaron Chang), both in person and online, where instant messaging is almost as consuming a pastime as watching skating videos on YouTube. Chris yearns to be like the wannabe-X-Games guys in these clips, but things keep getting in the way of his ambition—in particular, his mom Chungsing (Joan Chen), who amusingly ruins one of Chris’ homemade videos by chastising his chosen camera angle.
Chris resides in the Bay Area suburbs with Chungsing, his paternal grandmother Nai Nai (Chang Li Hua), and his sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), who’s on the precipice of leaving home for her freshman year at UC San Diego. Chris and his sibling don’t get along at all, in part because of his habit of stealing and wearing her sweatshirts—one of many catalysts for a dinner table fight that escalates due not only to the pair’s profane bickering but to Nai Nai’s critiques of Chungsing for her substandard parenting. Things are tense in this immigrant household, and the proverbial elephant in the room is the absence of the clan’s patriarch, whose whereabouts aren’t explicated until the film’s latter half and whose lack of participation in the family’s day-to-day is cause for considerable unhappiness.