All coming of age movies These events essentially strike the same rhythms: the acquisition of wisdom, the loss of innocence, the transition from childhood to a hard-won form of adulthood. Only the names, regions, eras, and cultures change. Draw a straight line from 400 hits to Lady of the Birds However, you will notice that the best of these stories do not just look back—in anger, or sadness, or in a hazy cloud of nostalgia—but they provoke an awareness of the good, the bad, and the very ugliness of your formative years. You can add the story of Shawn Wang Didi This is one of those films that adjusts the personal to the universal, turning the magic mirror’s reflection of its maker into a shared wavelength. The film is set in the suburbs of Fremont Bay Area, in the twilight of Facebook and the early days of romance in 2008. The pain, awkwardness, social dysfunction and random moments of bliss that mark early adolescence are public domain. (The film opens in New York this week; it opens Aug. 16.)
The director-writer’s on-screen counterpart and our tour guide through this ninth circle of teen-spirit hell is Chris (Isaac Wang, no relation), a 13-year-old Taiwanese-American boy navigating the rocky paths between the end of middle school and the beginning of high school. His mother, Zhongsing (Joan Chen), calls him “Didi,” a Chinese term of endearment that means “little brother.” His sister, Vivian (Shirley Chen), who is about to go to college, calls him a slob because he is generally a nuisance. His father doesn’t call him anything at all—he works overseas and is fairly absent from the family’s life. Nai Nai (Chang Li-hua) yells at everyone and endlessly criticizes his mother for being a terrible parent.
Chris has a group of friends who are also first-generation East Asian kids, and they all love to prank each other, talk about each other online and in person, and make potential videos for this relatively new site called YouTube. He has a crush on an older girl named Maddie (Mahayla Park), and given the regular conversations they have on AOL Instant Messenger—a film that’s very keen on getting cheap-looking technology to the internet’s teenage tears—the feeling may be mutual. When Chris isn’t skating, he’s filming things with his camcorder; a chance encounter with some older skateboarders looking for someone to film their tricks may be an opportunity for him to move up in terms of both a creative outlet and a new social circle.
Joan Chen and Isaac Wang in “Didi”.
Courtesy of Focus Features/Tal
It’s a fairly standard “That Was the Summer That Changed Everything” movie, but Wang doesn’t just put his own spin on a war scenario. There’s a sensitivity to his recollections of his younger self’s adventures, even if he says the story isn’t strictly autobiographical. Still, he wisely leaves the cheap, emotional sentimentality that’s so often found in these movies on the cutting room floor, refusing to smooth over his main character’s flaws and rough edges. Chris is, frankly, kind of an asshole at times. He pees in his sister’s lotion bottle and causes his poor mother endless grief. He has trouble reading the room, manages to alienate some of his friends, says offensive things, and when asked, simply shrugs or blocks people on Instant Messenger. (The way Isaac Wang plays Chris as someone whose shyness is both a factory and a defense mechanism, whose inability to keep up with the ever-changing rules of Teen Spirit becomes a weakness, is key.) Didi The film wouldn't be as successful as it is without its muted, subdued, sometimes harsh treatment of the hero coming of age.)
But Chris is also a typical kid trying to figure things out in real time, as friendships change, humiliating social encounters reverberate, and impromptu lies turn into pathological chains of lies. Wang doesn’t let the boy off easy—one scene where Chris tries to atone for past sins doesn’t yield the expected cliché that all is forgiven, because that’s not how life works. Still, Didi It doesn’t feel like an exorcism or someone trying to come to terms with his younger, pre-teen self. It’s more like Wang is curious about who this boy is, and is re-creating a moving scrapbook to better understand him. He’s sympathetic to what this 13-year-old went through to get to where he is now. And he has enough experience to know that some of the things that happened were actually kind of distorted.
If one aspect of the therapy session is already in progress Didi -One area where self-compassion gives way to genuine empathy–it concerns Chris's long-suffering mother. Wang may not dismiss the child's actions as “boys will be boys,” but he is able to see how Chungsing struggled and tried to express herself through largely underappreciated paintings. Chris is naturally embarrassed by her, snaps at her, and lashes out when Nai Nai or his older sister get angry at her at the dinner table. The child doesn't quite see what she's going through. The adult behind the camera can see it now, with the benefit of experience and hindsight, and the film almost feels like a belated apology. It makes it all the richer.
