The coming of age dramedy Didi explores that moment of maximum awkwardness and intensity for boys – the summer before entering high school. Their universe is their peers, and their desperation to be accepted and to avoid embarrassment is overwhelming. At the same time, raging testosterone seems to be crowding out the ability to think.
Didi is set at that moment (2008?) when teenagers were migrating from Myspace to Facebook. Chris Wang (Izaak Wang) lives with his older sister, their mom and his dad’s elderly mother in the Silicon Valley suburb of Fremont; the dad is away on a tech job in Taiwan. The mom (Joan Chen) has her hands full running the household by herself, and her would-be career as a fine arts painter is just not happening.
There’s a lot of immaturity in our world, but little is as obnoxious as that of a 14-year-old boy. Chris plunges ahead brashly, with a social clumsiness that is remarkable even for a young teen male. .
He is fascinated by a girl, but his best friend accurately observes that “you have zero game“. Chris also identifies what he thinks is a short cut to popularity, as a skate board filmer, but without any of the requisite preparation. He doubles down on a series of postures. One of the funniest aspects of Didi is Chris’ gift for telling pathetically naked lies that will inevitably be exposed.
Not only do Chris’ poses fail to work, he self-isolates and self-humiliates. He is going to have to learn whether he can accept who he is and is not, whether his sister is his ally instead of his antagonist, and whether his mother has something to offer besides meal preparation.
Didi features another stunning performance by Joan Chen as a mom absolutely beaten down by household drudgery, her ungrateful kids, and relentless criticism from mother-in-law. Through most of the film, the character is an emotional pinata, but Chen finishes the story with moments of searing humanity.
Didi is the first narrative feature written and directed by documentarian Sean Wang, who was nominated for an Oscar last year for his short film Nai Ni and Wai Po. Wang brings us into a teen milieu with unsurpassed authenticity.
Note: As a Bay Area native, I was confused by the Wang family home being in Fremont, but Chris starting to attending Fremont High, which is twenty miles away in Sunnyvale; that’s a dumb-down for the non-Bay Area audience. Writer-director Sean Wang himself grew up Taiwanese-American in Fremont and attended Irvington High.