Post by Dracula on Aug 11, 2024 15:21:50 GMT -5
Dìdi(8/8/2024)
Dìdi (which is the Mandarin word for Younger Brother) looks at a fourteen year old named Taiwanese-American named Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) during the summer of 2008, which is the summer inbetween middle school and high school for this young man. He lives with his mother (Joan Chen), sister (Shirley Chen), and grandmother (Chang Li Hua) in Fremont California. As the film begins Wang is a bit aimless in the way most teenagers are and mostly just fights with his sister and hangs out with his friends Fahad (Raul Dial) and “Soup” (Aaron Chang) with whom he’s known to sporadically raise a little bit of hell but mostly avoids serious trouble. Wang’s eyes have recently turned a bit towards girls and he develops a bit of a crush on a friend of a friend named Madi (Mahaela Park) and begins plotting ways to win her affections but he has other interests beyond that and also finds himself falling in with a group of slightly older skater kids and offers to become a “filmer” for them and photograph their skateboarding antics. Between all of this Wang will learn a lot over the course of this summer about himself, about filmmaking, and about his family.
The recent teen/preteen movies that Dìdi most resembles are actually ones that aren’t set in the early 2000s but the eras immediately before it and after it: Jonah Hill’s Mid90s and Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade. The Mid90s connection is related to Chris’ occasional troublemaking with friends and his eventual friendship with older skater kids who push him in even more adult directions. In fact much of the pleasure of the film comes from observing just how profane and irreverent teens of this era could be when talking with each other, but the movie never goes anywhere near as far into the dangerous territory we see Mid90s and Sean Wang has his protagonist retain a sweetness by the end of the film. The Eighth Grade connection comes from the fact that, under his occasional attempts at swagger, Chris Wang is in fact a very insecure kid who overthinks his every interaction and frequently gets in his own way when relating to others in a way that’s highly relatable. He’s more outgoing than the protagonist of Eighth Grade (see the aforementioned hellraising) but you get the distinct impression that a lot of that is the result of peer pressure to overcome his various hang-ups. As tends to be the case with autobiographical coming of age films we get hints of the character’s future as the filmmaker who would make the movie we’re watching as we see Wang become increasingly serious about photography late in the film and sure enough he has become a strong filmmaker as evidenced by Dìdi and I look forward to seeing what he can do when he moves beyond telling his own story.
**** out of Five
If you follow cultural conversations as of late a phrase you’ll have heard a lot is “the death of the monoculture,” which basically means that culture is splitting off into various niche interests rather than having everyone watching the same handful of TV networks or listening to the same handful of popular songs. The effects of this are likely to show up more in the years to come as we start having different collective memories and find our sense of nostalgia going in divergent directions. And that collective nostalgia is going to be more and more on display as the early 2000s increasingly becomes the subject of retrospective and nostalgia and we’re seeing that in the first wave of coming-of-age movies to be made by millennials. One pattern I’m noticing in these movies like Boyhood, Turning Red, or the show “Pen15” is that where once nostalgia would be sparked by seeing certain kinds of clothing or playing certain kinds of music but increasingly I’m noticing that what gets the nostalgic juices flowing now is seeing out of date technology, especially certain kinds of cell phones and computer interfaces and websites. We see that on display in the new 2008 set autobiographical film Dìdi, which heavily features the sight of Myspace, AIM, and old school Youtube in a way that people of a certain age are instantly going to recall in a big way.
Dìdi was directed by a guy named Sean Wang, who shares a last name with the film’s protagonist and I’m inclined to guess that’s not all he has in common with him. So we’ve clearly got an autobiographical work on our hands, which is a format we’ve been seeing pretty much since the dawn of cinema with mostly just the era and a couple of family specifics switched out. This one is not really re-inventing this wheel and it’s not even that much of a novelty in terms of what generation it’s looking at (although it’s is about younger millennials rather than elder malenials which is a bit unique), but there are some little things here and there that set the film apart. For one, it’s nice to see a coming of age movie about an immigrant family in which the parents aren’t uptight domineering taskmaster, which is almost a cliché at this point. You maybe get a trace of that from the grandmother, but Chris’ mother is apparently in America because she was following a dream of being a painter and doesn’t seem hellbent on Chris becoming a doctor and she’s relatively chill about his various rebellions. The film also knows how to employ just enough trappings of its era to tickle the nostalgia nerve (the Atmosphere needledrop was much appreciated) but not so much that the movie becomes obnoxiously backwards looking.
**** out of Five
