A still from ‘Dìdi’
| Photo Credit: Focus Features/YouTube

It is the stuff of horrors, mostly, to look back at your teenage years. Not just reminisce over the carefree days but really look at the awkward growing pains. Sean Wang’s semi-autobiographical film Dìdi is a similarly unflinching and jarringly specific teenage snapshot capturing the final years of the aughts.

Set in 2008 Fremont, California — a city defined by its proximity to Silicon Valley — Dìdi is quick and eager to throw us into the deep end of early social media. 14-year-old Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) rapidly switches from one tab to the next on his computer as he pores through YouTube videos and replies to messages on AOL. Later, we see him in his basement, through the hazy lens of a camcorder, recording amateur skateboarding tricks. Sean Wang directs his film within the vast confines of the burgeoning internet age, as Chris and his friends “poke” each other on Facebook and learn about their crushes’ interests through Myspace pages.

In his script Sean Wang, whose documentary short Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó was nominated at the 96^th Academy Awards, balances the universality of a life marked by social media with the unique circumstances faced by a Taiwanese-American teenager. Chris steals his sister’s band T-shirts to impress his crush, sneaks out to a party and then samples a cigarette to fit in with his older friends. When around his friends, he is boisterous, careless, and a menace. At home, Chris is weighed down by the absence of his father, while he deals with his grandmother (Chang Li Hua), and a quiet but concerned mother (Joan Chen). At home, he is not the Wang-Wang who carries a dead squirrel in the backpack to show his friends, but instead “dìdi” as his mother and grandmother call him, which translates to “little brother” in Mandarin.

Wang punctuates the eruptions in teenage boys with quiet inward contemplations. When Chris sees his mother using a knife and fork at McDonald’s, he chides her by saying, “You’re so Asian”. Later in the film, we see him leave behind his school friends to go film skateboarding tricks with some older kids, to whom he lies and claims that he is only “half-Asian”. The script, which at times may feel like Sean Wang has filled in with his own personal diary entries, doesn’t concern itself with picking through Chris’ individual problems. To him, all this seems like a jumbled mess that he can’t make sense of. So, when the script in a similar fashion is seamless in its chaos, Dìdi emerges to be a standout coming-of-age film.

The film is underscored by Izaac Wang and Joan Chen’s performance who take turns to individually anchor the script’s pathos. Joan Chen plays Chungsing Wang, a reserved painter, as a caring but cheeky mom, whose scenes with Chris embody a range of emotions.

In Dìdi, Sean Wang pulls from his memory, and from the public memory, the experience of being a teenager in 2008. It is a tightly shot, intimate, yet sweeping affair that conjures personal memories.

Dìdi is available for streaming on JioCinema