Sean Wang is a born filmmaker. Full stop. His first feature Dìdi (弟弟) is a confident, down to earth, beautifully realised directorial debut.
It’s a natural step up for the filmmaker who earned an Oscar nomination the same week that Dìdi scooped the Audience Award for U.S. dramatic film at Sundance this year. The film draws upon the documentary roots that Wang honed making films like his Oscar-nominated short doc Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó about the friendship between his paternal and maternal grandmothers. Dìdi takes audiences inside a Chinese-American home circa 2008 to deftly observe similar family dynamics. This portrait of familial love comes wrapped in the coming-of-age trimmings of a voice who found himself through a viewfinder.
Dìdi offers a tale of self-discovery at the advent of social media and selfie culture. Teens like Chris Wang (played by Izaac Wang from Clifford the Big Red Dog, no relation to Sean) navigate a relatively new form of self-expression. They talk in IMs instead of IRL. Emoticons, those precursors to full-fledged emojis, let Chris and his friends express themselves in semi-colons and parentheses to share joy, anxiety, or sadness. They even dabble in the newfangled phenomenon called YouTube and use self-portraits to share their stories with anyone who will watch.
It turns out that shooting the breeze with friends, Fahad (Raul Dial) and Soup (Aaron Chang), is a natural step for Chris, whose buds lovingly call him Wang Wang. Chris uploads videos of his buddies doing stupid things. They’re young teenagers, so they don’t aim for depth, but, fortunately, their 2008 shenanigans predate the era of insufferably self-serving influencer vapidity that will define the generation that follows them. He’s selling nothing but authenticity.
That genuine sense of self resonates throughout Dìdi. The film subtly examines the dynamics of a single parent family as Chris comes of age living with his annoying sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), his mom Chungsing (Joan Chen), and his maternal grandmother (Chang Li Hua, played by Wang’s own grandmother “Wài Pó” who appeared in Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó). There’s nothing extraordinary in the bickering that happens around the Wang family table. Vivian and Chris antagonise each other as siblings do. With Vivian heading off to college, too, their mom is especially, indefatigably, lovingly, and selflessly in high gear.
Protective, caring, and a bit too clingy, Chungsing loves her children. But she also bears the burden as an immigrant’s daughter: her success reflects her mother’s sacrifice. She dotes on her kids to excel, but she also fuels her own creative impulses. Chungsing paints constantly and expresses herself in vibrantly coloured canvasses that appear throughout the house. She might appear to want Chris to take the conventional (re: expected) path in life, but more than anyone, she understands the appetite that the camera feeds. She even gives Chris tips on directing in some of the videos that Wang peppers throughout the film.
However, with Chris being the 13-year-old boy that he is, he rebuffs everyone in search of popularity and the possibility of getting to first base, all the while looking at himself in the mirror and confronting what it means to grow up as Chinese-American in a mostly white neighbourhood. He alienates Fahad and Soup in favour of some skater boyz. The kids perform sick tricks while Chris becomes their unofficial videographer. Firework and fart videos on his YouTube page are replaced with shaky documents of the skaters’ moves on city steps and railings. He’s a regular Bing Liu documenting the freeing catharsis of skateboarding in the city.
At the same time, Chris enjoys monosyllabic exchanges and emoijified come-hither glances with a girl at school. Wang plays out their courtship with the live feed of instant messaging from the era in which everyone wrote like total dweebs. Honed on MySpace and, like, IQC, these kids spell “cool” as “kewl” and flirt with tragically phonetic exchanges. But Wang hilariously captures the lingo of Millennial life/love, along with sparing use of pop culture references, like a Walk to Remember name check that tells a crowd of a certain age just how much he’s puffing out his chest to get the girl. (IYKYK)
Comparisons to films like Bing Liu’s skateboarding doc Minding the Gap and Anthony Shim’s coming of age film Riceboy Sleeps seem inevitable, while the influence of Lady Bird looms strong, Wang has the makings of a singular voice. If there’s familiarity to the story of Dìdi, it’s because Wang intuitively taps into the family dynamics that audiences may have seen in other films or, more likely, families in their own circles or perhaps their very own household. It’s humane honesty about the push and pull relationships—bratty kids, overbearing moms—lends Dìdi finely observed grains of universal truth.
Wang proves especially confident with his actors. For one, Izaac Wang gives a natural performance. He embodies the youthful angst, restlessness, and hunger that befits of 13-year-old-boy. Chang, meanwhile, gives every bit as rich a breakthrough performance in her elder years. She’s an endearing nitpicker as the grandmother takes Chungsing to task. As Chris’s mother uses him and Vivian as hallmarks of her success to her friends, Wang observes the continuity among generations as parents look to their offspring to validate their sacrifices.
As Chungsing, though, Chen is heartbreakingly good. Chungsing finds herself caught in the tension of following her heart’s desires and doing the expected while projecting the same anxieties on her kids. There are exchanges throughout Dìdi when Chungsing addresses her son in Chinese and Chris rebelliously responds in English. The hurt on her face and the defiance on his says more than words could as Chen wrestles with the expectations weighing down on Chungsing. The heartache speaks a universal language, but also tells a story that is so refreshingly, recognizably specific.
