Dìdi (2024)
January 6, 2025 2:22 PM - Subscribe
In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can't teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.
A 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy named Chris as he navigates the summer before high school. He grapples with his cultural identity, experiences the joys and awkwardness of first love, and strengthens his bonds with friends while navigating the complexities of his relationship with his hardworking, single mother. Through skateboarding, online interactions, and everyday experiences, Chris begins to understand himself and his place in the world better. This coming-of-age story explores themes of family, identity, and self-discovery.
Tina Kakadelis:
Dìdi also tackles the flippant racism and homophobia of the early aughts. Chris tries his hardest to be a cool guy, someone who’s effortlessly unbothered by everything around him, but it’s clearly not true. The film’s opening scene sees the family at the dinner table. Vivian, their mom, and their grandmother are all using chopsticks, while Chris uses a fork. This sort of simple moment that speaks such volumes is what Dìdi does best. Izaac Wang is wonderfully grounded as Chris, but it is Joan Chen as his mother who is the beating heart of the film. Chen has such a storied career, one I was introduced to in Alice Wu’s Saving Face, (a performance and film that had a profound impact on my life). Chen’s actions are so specific, yet so simple, that by the time the film ends, it feels like she has become the audience’s own mother.
It’s Dìdi’s earnestness that makes its uber-specific 2008 story find a place in 2024. Just like Eighth Grade and Lady Bird, these are stories intrinsically tied to a particular time, space, and technology. Even though they aren’t our own autobiographical experiences, they feel like hazy memories of our adolescence. Dìdi extends a warmth and kindness to the lost, angry, and hopeful teen we all once were.
Ayla Ruby: Everyone is cruel to her, especially her live-in mother-in-law and the younger Chris. Her husband is absent, and it’s a point of attack for her family against her. Joan Chen’s performance telegraphs the struggling mother’s pain and all the conflicts in her life achingly well. Despite all of this and all of the things she carries weighing heavily on her soul, her story is not unhopeful. Though Chungsing is not the focus of Dìdi, her story calls to mind the recent film Shayda, where another mom is just trying to do her best for her kid.
Dìdi shines because of these complex characters and their believable world. It is not a blockbuster story, but a smaller human drama littered with small moments and decisions that promise the audience that, although the character’s lives are imperfect and messy (like those of us watching), it’s going to be OK in the end.
Shirley Li: That loose sensibility does yield a film that can feel somewhat formless, playing like an eclectic album of snapshots from Chris’s life rather than a cohesive whole. Even so, that lack of structure feels true to a teenager’s perspective: Like a lot of kids in 2008, Chris is all over the place online and off, overlooking how, amid his fumbling around for a perfect profile, he’s not alone in feeling overwhelmed. His mother, Chungsing (an affecting Joan Chen), initially hovers on the margins of the film, anxiously trying to keep the peace in a household containing of a pair of bickering siblings—Chris’s older sister has her own share of teenage grievances—and a mother-in-law with an inexhaustible arsenal of critiques. But as the film progresses, Wang subtly draws parallels between Chungsing and her son. Like him, she worries about how she’s perceived and questions who she is, now that she spends most of her time as her family’s caretaker instead of living the life she once had as a painter.
Dìdi exudes a special kind of empathy and warmth toward the kids who grew up in the age of Myspace, as well as their families. Many coming-of-age stories examine a child’s relationship with themselves and their parents, but Dìdi also tracks how those shifts were made more jarring and strange in the early days of social media. It’s a love letter to the world of Top 8s and status updates, an apology to beleaguered parents everywhere, and, perhaps for Wang, an embrace of his younger self’s disorientation. It may be obvious to anyone now that building a Myspace profile could never convey a person’s full self. But back then, it seemed important to try—and good fun, in all its mess, while it lasted.
Trailer
A 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy named Chris as he navigates the summer before high school. He grapples with his cultural identity, experiences the joys and awkwardness of first love, and strengthens his bonds with friends while navigating the complexities of his relationship with his hardworking, single mother. Through skateboarding, online interactions, and everyday experiences, Chris begins to understand himself and his place in the world better. This coming-of-age story explores themes of family, identity, and self-discovery.
Tina Kakadelis:
Dìdi also tackles the flippant racism and homophobia of the early aughts. Chris tries his hardest to be a cool guy, someone who’s effortlessly unbothered by everything around him, but it’s clearly not true. The film’s opening scene sees the family at the dinner table. Vivian, their mom, and their grandmother are all using chopsticks, while Chris uses a fork. This sort of simple moment that speaks such volumes is what Dìdi does best. Izaac Wang is wonderfully grounded as Chris, but it is Joan Chen as his mother who is the beating heart of the film. Chen has such a storied career, one I was introduced to in Alice Wu’s Saving Face, (a performance and film that had a profound impact on my life). Chen’s actions are so specific, yet so simple, that by the time the film ends, it feels like she has become the audience’s own mother.
It’s Dìdi’s earnestness that makes its uber-specific 2008 story find a place in 2024. Just like Eighth Grade and Lady Bird, these are stories intrinsically tied to a particular time, space, and technology. Even though they aren’t our own autobiographical experiences, they feel like hazy memories of our adolescence. Dìdi extends a warmth and kindness to the lost, angry, and hopeful teen we all once were.
Ayla Ruby: Everyone is cruel to her, especially her live-in mother-in-law and the younger Chris. Her husband is absent, and it’s a point of attack for her family against her. Joan Chen’s performance telegraphs the struggling mother’s pain and all the conflicts in her life achingly well. Despite all of this and all of the things she carries weighing heavily on her soul, her story is not unhopeful. Though Chungsing is not the focus of Dìdi, her story calls to mind the recent film Shayda, where another mom is just trying to do her best for her kid.
Dìdi shines because of these complex characters and their believable world. It is not a blockbuster story, but a smaller human drama littered with small moments and decisions that promise the audience that, although the character’s lives are imperfect and messy (like those of us watching), it’s going to be OK in the end.
Shirley Li: That loose sensibility does yield a film that can feel somewhat formless, playing like an eclectic album of snapshots from Chris’s life rather than a cohesive whole. Even so, that lack of structure feels true to a teenager’s perspective: Like a lot of kids in 2008, Chris is all over the place online and off, overlooking how, amid his fumbling around for a perfect profile, he’s not alone in feeling overwhelmed. His mother, Chungsing (an affecting Joan Chen), initially hovers on the margins of the film, anxiously trying to keep the peace in a household containing of a pair of bickering siblings—Chris’s older sister has her own share of teenage grievances—and a mother-in-law with an inexhaustible arsenal of critiques. But as the film progresses, Wang subtly draws parallels between Chungsing and her son. Like him, she worries about how she’s perceived and questions who she is, now that she spends most of her time as her family’s caretaker instead of living the life she once had as a painter.
Dìdi exudes a special kind of empathy and warmth toward the kids who grew up in the age of Myspace, as well as their families. Many coming-of-age stories examine a child’s relationship with themselves and their parents, but Dìdi also tracks how those shifts were made more jarring and strange in the early days of social media. It’s a love letter to the world of Top 8s and status updates, an apology to beleaguered parents everywhere, and, perhaps for Wang, an embrace of his younger self’s disorientation. It may be obvious to anyone now that building a Myspace profile could never convey a person’s full self. But back then, it seemed important to try—and good fun, in all its mess, while it lasted.
Trailer
Speaking as someone who was a teen in the 80s, it didn't resonate with the same force but it still clicked with me as a coming of age story. Joan Chen is really good here.
posted by Bryant at 8:49 AM on January 7
posted by Bryant at 8:49 AM on January 7
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I don't know how this hits if you didn't have AIM and myspace right as you were hitting teenage years, but it felt very resonant to me.
posted by Carillon at 2:24 PM on January 6 [2 favorites]