Of the movie genres, coming-of-age is, for me, the thorniest; it is a template that invites audience assent on the basis that its story components are poignantly funny because they are recognisably true – ie a quirky unrequited teen love followed by some kind of romantic resolution, crowned by the mature realisation that what really counts is friendship among your peer group. In fact, coming-of-age is in its way as artificial as horror or romcom or Japanese Noh theatre. Real life is far messier and more unsatisfying, and the resolutions of romance or friendship or relations with your parents won’t happen at least until your 20s, if at all.
This makes Sean Wang’s quasi-autobiographical Dìdi (Chinese for “kid brother”) an interesting variation on a theme; I like to think its teen angst and teen friendship is inspired by our own TV classic The Inbetweeners. The setting is Fremont, California in 2008, a world where Facebook is gaining ascendancy over Myspace and kids are uploading skating videos to YouTube. Like Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, this film uses the teen comedy Superbad as a huge pop-cultural marker. (The fact that Superbad stars Jonah Hill may conceivably be intended as a subliminal reminder of Hill’s own slacker-skater film Mid90s, a big influence here.)
Izaac Wang plays Chris, a Taiwanese-American kid in his early teens, who lives with his mum Chungsing, tenderly and sympathetically played by Joan Chen, along with his permanently furious older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) and his grandma and Chungsing’s mother-in-law, Nai Nai. The latter is played by Chang Li Hua, the director’s actual grandmother, featured in his Oscar-nominated documentary short Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó, about his two grandmothers. Chris’s father is away in Taiwan, supposedly to earn money to keep the family afloat – an elephant-in-the-living-room subject from which Chris’s mother distracts herself with her dream of being an artist.
Chris hangs out with his friend…
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