There’s a lot to like about Didi right from the start – those lazy summer days just as your about to become a teenager where running around yelling, mucking about with bangers, playing football, skateboarding and just getting up to no good before the realization that school’s about to get serious. It’s a slim slice of life where responsibility is just an awkward word in a spelling test. As time goes on each generation of audiences can identify with a different coming of age film whether it be Stand By Me to Superbad and now we have Didi, a throwback to 2008, a time when the internet was really beginning to take off with sites like My Space, a flip phone was THE phone to have and Jimmy Saville was still that innocuous yet peculiar shell suit wearing pensioner on TV.
Chris Wang (Isaac Wang) is a 13 year old Asian American boy living with his mum, his about-to-leave-for-college sister and his very old grandmother whilst his unseen father is working away in Taiwan. It’s Mum who has to battle with a critical mother in law and two warring children but it’s Chris who’s trying to make his mark with equally unsure friends. His diverse bunch of friends are all finding their way through adolescence joshing each other with abusive banter, all wanting to be gangstaaaaa about as convincingly as Justin Bieber. Into this is thrown Chris’ crush on a girl Mada (Mahaela Park) and his tentative first steps into romance – his naïve researching How to Kiss on a youtube video is one of many enjoyable moments. But throughout at times a cleverly nuanced script where the slightest throwaway comment can be devastating and here it’s when Chris thinks he’s getting closer to Mada she tells him, ‘You’re pretty cute…for an Asian’. At the same time his friends attitude to women and his own bickering with his sister makes forming meaningful female relationships all very confusing for him and it explodes in a tirade of abuse towards his already embattled mother.
Isaac Wang and Joan Chen who plays his mother are especially good and his banter with his sister in the first part of the film in an all too recognisable highlight for those who had older sisters. As with nearly every coming of age film there’s plenty of laugh out loud moments which evaporate as the Chris’s transient friendships see him befriend a group of skaters. He offers to film for his fledgling youtube channel with its handful of clips with his friends pulling silly faces or old women shouting on the street which he quickly deletes when they come round to watch his skaters clips.
There’s a lot to like here from Wang and Chen’s performances, a reminder of a perhaps more innocent digital time and yet the emotions remain the same and are universal as adolescence begins in earnest and all that that entails. Didi doesn’t have the emotional end line truism of Stand By Me ( ‘I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Does anyone?’) but Didi still captures those social dynamics when that age and still rings true.
related feature : ‘Snack Shack’- coming of age in the 1980’s
related feature : Director Toby L talks about Damon Albarn, Liam Gallagher and his documentary, ‘ To the End’
Here’s the Didi trailer……
