One of the funny things about getting older is that you eventually get to witness the times you grew up in become the subject of a nostalgic coming-of-age film by a promising, young filmmaker. Its era-specific pop-cultural touchstones that Wang seems to enjoy sprinkling throughout his debut feature, Dìdi (弟弟), a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman of teenagehood in the late-aughts. The film tells the story of Chris Wang (Izaac Wang), a 13-year-old doing his best to survive the formative summer between middle and high school, the moment when you suddenly feel you have outgrown being a kid but are too young to understand how to be mature. Wang’s life revolves around capturing the antics of his friends, a diverse mix that represents the multiethnic southeastern Bay Area, as they blow up mailboxes, prank each other and try to get their first ollie on video. Wang’s lifelines are his cheap camcorder and internet connection. It’s this kernel that filmmaker Sean Wang makes the locus of his character’s development, an origin story of the young artist shaped by the era of YouTube poops, memes and skate videos.
The process by which particular bits of media become inscribed into a generation’s cultural memory is always fascinating, but Wang seems less interested in filling his testament to the late 2000s with the cultural canon than he is collecting a scrapbook of more personal and even cringy favorites. Belonging to perhaps the first generation that can claim the title of “internet natives,” many of the film’s best scenes adapt the familiar beats of the coming-of-age story to the landscape of AOL chatrooms and decked-out Myspace pages. Wang is clever enough to understand what it takes to translate the drama of an adolescence lived online to the medium of cinema, hinging plot and character moments on something as small as the changing of a status or following the movements of the cursor as Chris lurks his crush’s social media profile.
The beating heart of the story is Chris’ relationships with his older, college-bound sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) and his mother, Chungsing (Joan Chen), whose life is devoted to raising her children and taking care of her aging mother-in-law while sacrificing her own aspiration of becoming a successful painter. The family is supported by money from an invisible father who works abroad in Taiwan and is mentioned about as often as he visits, which is seldom. The efforts of Chungsing are what hold the family together and her relationship to her son is played with an earnest believability as she tries to relate to Chris’ own dreams of artistic fulfillment. She chafes at his efforts to hide his ethnic identity, such as when he tells a group of older boys he wants to impress that he is only half-Asian. The generational misunderstanding between Chris and his mother is made all the more intense by the fact that she is raising her children in a country she is not from, where they experience a childhood full of pressures she has trouble relating to. It doesn’t help that Chris is expected to be more like the other sons of the local Taiwanese community, high achievers with expensive tutors and eyes set on admission to Harvard, or maybe Standford as a safety. When asked by a family friend over dinner what Chris plans to do with his life, she replies with some uncertainty, “he likes to make videos.”
To hear Sean Wang tell it, the arc of his life has always bent towards filmmaking. We watch as Chris is enlisted by a group of skaters to shoot a video for them after he lightly exaggerates his skills behind the camera. This task ultimately separates him from his friends and puts him in situations he is not quite ready to handle. We can feel the palpable sense of embarrassment from Sean Wang at many of these early moments in his life that come to shape his interest in filmmaking, including a particularly heartbreaking scene where Chris deletes a trove of footage ‒ digital life can be just as ephemeral as it is permanent, after all. If one of the functions of storytelling is the ordering of disparate, chaotic memories into a coherent and clear narrative, Wang’s film constitutes an act of self-mythologizing memoir. The film’s final moments bring this home with perhaps too heavy a hand as Chris begins his first day of high school by signing up for the filmmaking club, the line of providence here being drawn a touch too explicitly. Despite some forgivable self-indulgence, the film is effortlessly charming and it’s hard not to find Sean Wang an endearing voice, even if overly reliant on that rule to young screenwriters to “write what you know.”
Photo courtesy of Focus Features
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