Dìdi (弟弟)
Finding truth in the specifics. Plus, a programming note.
Chris (Izaac Wang) wants what every 13-year-old wants: a sense of self, a feeling of belonging, the reassurance that he’s cool. He swipes the band t-shirts of his older sister, Vivian (Shirley Chen), so he can impress a girl with his borrowed musical taste. He films the hijinks he and his friends get into and posts the videos to YouTube: a search for attention just as much as a mode of self-expression. He practices ollies in the garage, where no one can see him losing control of his skateboard. Chris isn’t confident enough to throw himself around on a set of wheels; we never actually see him ride the skateboard. One sequence shows him instead running with his camcorder in one hand and his skateboard in the other, his backpack banging against his shoulder as he tries to keep up with a group of teenagers skating away from a mall cop. The very things he uses as status symbols to catapult himself into a cooler circle of friends can only weigh him down in the end.
Dìdi can be pinpointed to a precise time and place: Fremont, California, in the summer of 2008. Writer/director Sean Wang grounds his film in objects, peppering the movie with granular moments that involve something small and concrete: pink rhinestones bedazzling a blue iPod Nano, a bottle of lotion, the way Chris flips his Razr phone open to send a text message, a purloined novelty eraser, a peeled hard-boiled egg held to Chris’s eye in an attempt to keep the swelling down after a fight with another kid. Sean Wang is more interested in individual moments than he is in the connective tissue between them. As with so many other coming-of-age movies, plot takes a back seat to mood, with the film fixating on the little interactions between teens. These small pieces, taken together, build up into a portrait of a complicated, dramatically rich inner life.
The completeness of that portrait is remarkable, given that Chris hasn’t yet figured out how to become a person whom others can take seriously. He’s Chris at school, but he’s also Wang Wang to his best friends and Dìdi (Mandarin for “little brother”) to his family. Izaac Wang embodies the character with an assured, guarded performance: Chris is always watching, always trying to suss out the rules behind any given interaction. He’s boisterous with his friends and rude when he knows he can get away with it. Most of his attitude is a front to cover for his uncertainty about where he fits in the fabric of society. When he’s not sure about a social situation, he hangs back, allowing the others around him to take the lead and then following their example. Often he miscalculates, using terms that are far too rude and familiar for other characters whom he’s just met.
None of this is spoken out loud, only observed by the camera. Viewers willing to meet Chris at his most uncertain and obnoxious will be rewarded with a portrait not only of his time and place, but also of his inner life—remarkable especially because Chris himself is unwilling to talk about the difficulties of adolescence with anyone else. He simply doesn’t know how to do so just yet. His most vulnerable emotional outpouring is not to another person, but to an AOL Instant Messenger chat bot. Even online, he’s a person in search of an identity. All his peers use different colors and fonts to express themselves, but Chris’s instant messages are typed in the default font, black text on a white background. Under Sean Wang’s direction, this detail is another indication of a character who doesn’t yet know who they are. Chris still maintains a personality while online (the camera swoops across the computer screen whenever his focus shifts, lending the point-of-view shot an extra level of subjectivity); it’s just that Chris doesn’t yet know how to express himself or his feelings in a healthy or constructive way.
Chris’s story will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever felt alienated as a teen. It’s become a bit of a cliché to describe coming-of-age movies that nail a specific context and emotion as “finding the universal in the specific.” This critical line feels like an attempt to apply a template for a common human experience to a precisely told story, as though “universality” somehow grants a story told from a specific, nonmajority perspective more validity by conforming to a pattern imposed on it from the outside. But Chris’s context is very specific: he’s Taiwanese, a teen boy growing up in a skater/punk subculture in the late aughts. Sean Wang manages to pull off that feeling of alienation by building his story from all the little details that make Chris who he is and that color his perception of the world. There isn’t a lesson to be learned here; there’s just the expression of this one character’s truth. The movie as a whole is affable, even in the painful parts: the embarrassment, the alienation, the moments when Chris can’t help but push everyone else away. This story isn’t universal. It is truthful. —Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★☆
Dìdi is in theaters nationwide now.
A quick programming note from Sarah and Kevin: we’re shifting our writing schedule, as well as our newsletter-writing responsibilities, ever so slightly. We’ve had to rein in our publishing schedule a bit, so you can expect to receive a newsletter from us two to three times a month, rather than every single week. Our respective schedules and lives mean that Sarah primarily writes for the newsletter, while Kevin primarily edits, although our roles reverse occasionally. As it had been previously with the podcast, our written coverage is always a conversation between both Kevin and Sarah.
If you’ve been reading us for a while, you’ve probably noticed this schedule shift already. We appreciate your support and your readership. Thank you for being part of the conversation, and thank you for joining us as we search for the sacred on screen.