Joan Chen Brought Real Emotions to Dìdi’s Perfect Final Shot
There is a moment at the very end of Dìdi, director Sean Wang’s feature debut, where it becomes clear that the film you’ve just seen is so much more than the story of one 13-year-old’s coming of age in Fremont, California. Chris (Izaac Wang) and his mother Chungsing (Joan Chen) sit across from each other at their kitchen table. Chris is eating an after-school snack his mother has prepared as she watches him, her face beaming with pure love, eyes brimming with tears. He looks back at her timidly, reminiscent of the little boy he’s rapidly leaving behind. Wang pored over this wordless moment that the audience experiences for all of 45 seconds; he spent a half-hour on Izaac’s take alone. But it’s an image that walks out of the theater with you.
“That scene is also a very direct homage to Where the Wild Things Are,” Wang told me in a conversation over Zoom, referencing that film’s ending. The shot in his own film served, on one level, as a “thank you” to director Spike Jonze — who makes an appearance as the voice of a dead squirrel — for making the film that Wang saw when he was the fictional Chris’s age. It’s a work he credits with inspiring his own journey into filmmaking. But while Jonze’s film spends precious little time with its protagonist’s mother, what brings us to this moment in Dìdi sets us up for a much more devastating impact.
Chris never meets any magical creatures on his journey through the summer before high school (hallucinations of dead squirrels notwithstanding). Instead, he learns to block people on AIM as a power move, read about his friends’ feelings in Facebook statuses, and to check his best friend’s MySpace top eight to find out if they’re beefing. With a sister about to leave for college, a grandmother who has entered a slow physical decline, and an absent father, Chungsing is Chris’s only true constant and therefore the easiest presence for him to define himself against. He rejects his Taiwanese mother’s Asianness, insults her work as a painter, and in a particularly brutal screaming match, tells her outright he’s ashamed to be her son. It is perhaps this moment of teenage cruelty that makes the final moments of the film so overwhelming.
Chen, for her part, almost turned down the role, worried she was too old to pass for the mother of a 13-year-old. Wang would have none of it. He’d set his heart on casting Chen based on a single scene in the film Tigertail, in which a lost love (played by Tzi Ma) tries to reconnect with Chen’s character over lunch, decades after leaving her to emigrate to America with another woman. “She has a deeply felt presence,” Wang explained. Chen brought an extremely personal commitment to her role in Dìdi. She asked Wang’s real mother to record lines for her so she could better capture the woman her role was based on. Her age was also not the liability she feared. Instead, it was a mark of the experience she brought: that of a mother of two adult daughters. “The whole journey is somewhat redemptive for me, that I feel I have a chance to somehow do it all over again,” she told me. “To be a better mother.”
After their horrible fight, Chungsing admits to Chris she sometimes fantasizes about the life she might have had if she’d come to America without a husband and made a real go of it as an artist. In this way, the character is a sort of foil for Chen, who did come to the United States on her own and built a successful career as an actor. But Chen doesn’t pretend that artistic success would’ve made Chungsing’s life any less complicated: “There is not one right way to do anything,” Chen said. “There are so many occasions of unintended hurt and things we said we should not have said, things we did not say we should have said. And all of that just came when we were doing that [final] shot.”
Chen’s presence in the film feels almost spiritual, giving life to a kind of raw, unlimited love. She described working with Wang’s actual grandmother, Chang Li Hua — who plays Chris’s grandmother in her first acting role — as needing to be “like the water that can circle around and embrace any shape.” Truly, water is the best way to describe her presence: a quiet, powerful force moving swiftly to fill empty spaces and giving those around her a surface to float on. Watching her, it’s hard to not feel a sense of relief at her character’s complexity, given our culture’s oscillating obsessions with the stern aesthetic of the girlboss mother and the submissive tradwife. The filmmaker also says that part of his goal was to subvert the idea of the “tiger mom,” another archetype used to flatten the inner worlds of Asian mothers. Chungsing exists, like most real human beings, somewhere in between these extreme images. She’s imperfect, but she is trying, because she loves her children, even when she has no idea what she’s doing wrong. Wang tells me the idea for the film really began to crystallize when he turned 26 — the age his parents had been when they first came to America. It inspired him to start considering life from their point of view, which is evident in the way Chungsing is written. She is a portrait you can only paint of your mother once you’re old enough to realize that this whole time she was just a person.
The final shot took so long to nail down that Wang admits he actually had to wrap Izaac (due to child-labor laws) and sit in for Chris himself for some shots of Chen. But the person on Chen’s mind was neither the director nor her fictional son — she thought of her own daughters as the tears came. “That particular take, it was just overflowing out of me because as a mother, especially during my children’s teen years, we had so much struggle and so much difficulty and I had so much regret,” she said. The filming of that scene took on extra weight since one of her daughters was actually on set to help out the small crew. “It was all the love I wanted to tell my children and all the regrets that I felt at that moment.” The tears were unexpected. “I am not demonstrative, usually. I don’t cry in front of people,” she explained. “Except for that particular shot, it was easy.”
When the camera turns to Chris, the look he gives his mother is both shy and innocent. Wang was going for a moment free of angst, the kind of look a very small child might give their mom. While it wasn’t a stated intention of the director, I also read an uncertainty in Chris’s face. A sort of fear he doesn’t quite understand. There’s an embarrassment, a “who, me?” to the way he receives his mother’s gaze. Yes, he is his mother’s dream, but how could he be enough? He is almost begging for the reassurance of his mother’s profound love, while at the same time being humbled by the force of it. In this moment, she is a newly understood version of mommy, the person you run to, the one you cry out for, and also the mysterious adult woman you can never fully know, but who is somehow, also, home.
I asked both director and actor what they hope people take from the film’s ending. Wang spoke about appreciating the formative nature of your adolescence and said the final shot is not meant to be an abrupt end but a reminder that Chris’s life keeps going. “I do think a lot of the things that you experience in adolescence shape your worldview as an adult, but you don’t have the vocabulary to articulate any of that,” he said. “Hopefully, people reflect on their own childhoods, reflect on their own relationships with their moms.” Chen’s request is more simple: “I hope all the mothers would reflect and rejoice in their motherhood, and all the children will call their parents.”
Related