It is not every day that we come across a movie that captures adolescence in such an authentic and realistic fashion. Dìdi illustrates that difficult stage in life where inexperience is contested with anxiety and the whole wide world feels to be against us, where every perceived struggle balloons to gigantic proportions that only time will later take care of.
Written and directed by Sean Wang, Dìdi is a coming-of-age set in 2008 that follows Chris (Izaac Wang), a 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy, as he navigates life during the last month of summer before high school begins. At first sight, it bears a close resemblance to Mid90s by Jonah Hill in being a coming-of-age as well as an exploration of an era. From the usual social media of those years as Myspace, AOL Instant Messenger, and YouTube, digital cameras now unused, to albums such as Riot! By Paramore, the year 2008 is seen and felt everywhere right from the beginning. This is something continuously reinforced given the time spent on screens with Chris navigating the internet or chatting with his peers. In this sense, the movie is not only allowing for information to be delivered in an authentic way as teens usually do, but also it is inviting us to relive those experiences again, whether that is indulging in nostalgia from our individual memories or from looking at those websites and remembering they once looked that way.
Dìdi is Chinese for 'Younger Brother' and this is relevant in the story because, as the younger sibling, Chris is influenced by his older sister and his desire to appear older, and therefore, by his logic, someone whose presence will be deemed valuable by others. By craving belongingness, Chris is willing to change different aspects about his projected image, something possible by the control exercised upon it through social media, a phenomenon the era before the internet never provided. By reason of this, it is easy to find relatability in the film, even more so if you are a young adult who lived 2008 as an adolescent. This also makes us sympathetic about Chris, because we know how it felt to live those experiences. How anxiety took control of us in given situations, how many times we said something without malice but ended up being misinterpreted, making us look bad, how we behaved before our romantic interests, and so on.
It is common to see teens written in a one-dimensional way, as silly, without much profundity, and without any care for any realistic quality or what they are experiencing other than being laughing stocks, but Chris is a well-written character, and Izaac Wang manages to portray every nuanced expression. His is the kind of performance that does not need dramatic unrealistic dialogue to evoke sympathy and emotions because he can say a lot without a single word, just looking at his face and body language.
