As Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade showed us, the junior high experience has gotten even more horrifying in the social media age. What was already a minefield of puberty and testing societal norms gets even more exhausting when it comes home with you. And, if say, you were a shy awkward kid who immigrated from Taiwan with your family like Didi shows us? Your only job is to “batten down the hatches until the storm blows over.” I’m so glad I grew up before all of this.
Didi is Chris Wang’s (Izaac Wang) mom, Chungsing’s (Joan Chen) pet name for the 13 year old. Chris does standard 13 year old boy stuff: hang out with his friends like the charismatic Fahad (Raul Dial) and blow up things, constantly fight with his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) who’s off to college in a month, or film himself skateboarding or his Nai Nai (Chang Li Hua) saying crazy things for views on YouTube in 2008. With high school on the horizon, Chris is hoping for one last chance at a summer fling with his crush Madi (Mahaela Park) before he enters his new HS life the same as his old one.
While Eighth Grade danced around it, Didi is the best showcase for how the first generation of kids grew up with social media. Director Sean Wang pilfers Searching‘s premise and makes it Sean’s biggest character trait. Like any kid nowadays, say you have a crush on someone? What are you doing? Looking them up on social media, seeing what stuff they like right? Sean Wang does this efficiently and wordlessly, simulating Chris in front of his computer, using a bunch of nostalgic apps for anyone around them (early days of Myspace, YouTube, AIM, if you know you know). It’s amazing what a deleted potential message, or a social media search can do for character development, showing us everything without a character spitting it out. In fact, one of the big scenes of the movie is Chris’s conversation with one of his friends on AOL Instant Messenger, that tells you everything you need to know about Chris’s current emotional state with just a few messages. Those early days people were open books…but still, even then, everyone presented themselves like they wanted the world to see them. Chris doesn’t have the social acumen to understand this like Fahad or Madi do, and as such this place he spends a lot of his time becomes as toxic of a relationship as any one he has with some of his bad friends, which Sean Wang shows us through screens in a way that no other coming of age film has quite attempted this way before.
The story goes the road less traveled a bit too. Instead of making this a standard immigrant tale, Didi goes the bolder path. This movie is much more about unfulfilled lives, not usually the choice for a coming of age story. But hey, not all people grow up to be 100% happy carefree and charming by high school right? Years of movies like Superbad have you waiting for Chris to wise up: to open his heart to someone – ANYONE – he likes and for them to like him back. But that’s not how the real world works. Chris is awkward and shy, and the more people learn about him the less they like. The movie puts him into a strained stressed out house too: mom Chungsing is constantly trying and failing to keep order in the sullen house, and hear painting which usually brings her respite also is filled with letdowns and setbacks when she tries to showcase it to the world. And when people stop caring? There’s not a blowup like in the movies…they just stop showing up in your day to day existence, moving on while people like Chris or his mom want things to stay ok with their close friends. As Didi goes along, that constant isolation and frustration at no one understanding you builds and builds to its natural breaking point in this story, one that flirts with some dark stuff that’s probably going through more minds of people, especially teenagers, than you think.
Despite the cultural specificity of Didi, it’s through that specificity that it finds a lot of universal stuff in the middle. It also finds just a delight of 2008y stuff that will seem either quaint or weird to people years from now. Like the long overdue mini shout out to Motion City Soundtrack, a band that should have been bigger than they actually got: very much the Didi of the emo/pop punk world.