As an Asian-American member of Gen Z, born and raised in California, Dìdi seems formulated to appeal to folks like me. Like Chris, the picture’s lead character, I’m a second-generation American who grew up on early aughts indie rock (though, not to impress a crush, I swear) and was a wannabe slacker from a type-A immigrant family. Perhaps this is where the problem lies, though. Rather than nailing down its perspective, Dìdi is too interested in catering to a wider audience.
There’s potential for something distinctive in its subjectivity—think of the shoddy, shaky camera footage of adolescent skateboarding that’s as amateur as the acts themselves. In Dìdi, development is occurring on multiple axes: technological, social and generational, and the film is best when it’s unmooring these at once. Dìdi is bogged down, though, by its reliance on coming-of-age clichés: sex and drugs as markers of maturity, family conflict that’s easily smoothed over, the struggle of forming an identity when one has an insecure sense of self.
Writer/director Sean Wang hits these expected beats, in doing so relinquishing a specific lens in favor of a cheap appeal to universality. There’s an axiom about universality that I find is always resonant: the more specific something is, the more universal it actually ends up being. In Dìdi, universality is the point, but in adopting common conventions and circumventing a specific eye, it foregoes the details that render its individuals truer to life.
Centering on Chris Wang (Izaac Wang), a younger likeness of filmmaker Sean Wang, Dìdi is set in Fremont, California in 2008. In the vein of other mid-aughts coming-of-age films, Dìdi is structured as a series of vignettes. Chris is 13, and accordingly, he’s experiencing the typical troubles of someone his age: navigating a crush on 14-year-old Madi (Mahaela Park), fighting with his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), and struggling to understand his first-generation mother Chungsing (Joan Chen).
Of course, these threads are complicated through myriad textural choices, ones rooted in Sean Wang’s own childhood. For one, Dìdi is interested in tracking how adolescent angst was documented through instant messenger, Myspace and Facebook, though this is etched in a cursory, nonspecific fashion rather than these serving as devices that demonstrate Chris’s interiority. It’s not that these inclusions feel contrived, but they do feel nonconsequential; these scenes are blips of retro-tech comedy but indicate little about Chris beyond him feeling a generic kind of social anxiety.
See, for instance, Chris checking his best friend Fahad’s (Raul Dial) Myspace account to check if he’s still at the top of his friends list. The introduction of social media serves as another sphere through which to contemplate one’s own social position, concretely bringing social worries to domestic life. It is frequently very funny, like when Chris repeatedly checks Madi’s Myspace or Facebook to learn about her favorite music or favorite films, only to parrot them to her while chatting with her online. It’s simple, but we’ve all been there.
Dìdi is also interested in Chris’s Asianness, in the social and generational implications of his second-generation Taiwanese-American identity. His mother, Chungsing, is a painter—a great one, at that—but he’s embarrassed of her artistic failure and in turn fails to grasp her work. Similarly, he’s ashamed of her accent, feeling sheepish when she chats with white skaters who might become his friends. He claims to them that he’s half-Asian, his father’s absence granting him comfort within this lie. But Chris’ feelings toward his mother and father aren’t focalized by any stretch, and when they are pivotal, it’s only in the ways you expect—archetypal of Asian first-gen and second-gen tensions.
There are a couple of evocative moments of camerawork in Dìdi that speak to an understanding that Chris is unable to arrive at. At one point, Chris’s grandmother Nai Nai (Chang Li Hua) collapses in the garden of Chris’ home; Dìdi frames Chris coming to her aid as a painterly artwork, one that brings to mind Chungsing’s pieces. Chungsing’s pieces are oil paintings that often feature individuals against vast landscapes. For a moment, Chris and Nai Nai are framed the same: a lethargic, aging figure carried up by her young grandson against a backdrop of lush greenery and colorful fruit trees. Maybe neither of them quite understand Chungsing, but they’re a part of her world anyway.
Nai Nai has a fraught relationship with Chungsing, particularly because of her lack of achievement in art and her comparatively lax approach to parenting. This intergenerational chasm is a fulcrum of the film (see: Dìdi’s title, which means “younger brother” in Chinese) but underexplored—or not meaningfully explored beyond broad strokes. This image, though, is a signifier of what Sean Wang has described as central to his feature: Chungsing is the heart of the family, a figure trying to bridge the seemingly interminable gaps between generations—at play due to variations in experience with technology, aging and locales. In this moment, those rifts are gone.
It’s unfortunate, then, that as fun as Dìdi often is, its motifs receive such perfunctory treatment. Chris’ subjectivity feels almost nonexistent, as if he is a stand-in for any other mildly socially anxious teenager dealing with friendship troubles, social media doom-scrolling and second-generation American alienation. A scene midway through the movie, where a friend chases Chris and some others with a squirrel carcass, all while he films it on a trembling, lo-fi video camera, encapsulates the film’s untapped potential for specificity, absurdity and precision. It’s ridiculous, deceptively simple and formally imaginative, making use of its era. This, among other droll scenes, makes Dìdi worth a watch. It’s very important that we know how much delight can be found in the corpses of squirrels, maybe even more than, say, the highs and lows of pursuing a middle school crush.
Director: Sean Wang
Writer: Sean Wang
Starring: Izaac Wang, Joan Chen, Chang Li Hua, Raul Dial, Aaron Chang, Mahaela Park, Chiron Cilia Denk, Montay Boseman, Sunil Mukherjee Maurillo, Alaysia Simmons, Alysha Syed, Georgie August, Joan Chen
Release Date: July 26, 2024
Hafsah Abbasi is a film critic who has covered the Sundance Film Festival and the Mill Valley Film Festival in years past. She currently resides in Berkeley, California. Find her latest writing at https://twitter.com/hafs_uh.