Can the act of soul-bearing ever feel hollow, or is that an oxymoron? The soul is a person’s figurative dimension hidden from phenotype or possession. The term is even used as a colloquialism to indicate something that is deeply rooted and beyond superficial reach. Soul music is not made of tinny hi-hats, but ocean-deep basslines and a tonal voice retrieved from the bottom of the diaphragm. As a phrase for an emotional exterior, hearts may be worn on the sleeve, but someone having soulful eyes is like looking at pools of mystery and experience.
The contradictory question can be answered by confronting the conundrum that is Dìdi, Sean Wang’s first full-length film. Hot off his exceptional short film Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó (nominated for an Oscar last year), Wang revisits his past — specifically, a snapshot of a summer in the Bay Area suburbs. Texturally, Dìdi shares the sights and sounds of a photojournal unearthed from the mid-’00s. The cracks and slips of teenhood are unabashedly exposed in Chris (Izaac Wang) as he navigates crushes, friendship, and family. The execution of nostalgia, both by first-time actors and long-time talent, is apparent on paper, but like a picture without substance to claw into, it can already fade from the memory upon arrival.
Let’s go back to the year 2008. People learned basic HTML to refashion their mouse cursor as Cartman or the Hatchetman on their MySpace page. Paramore was but another band on the once-existed Warped Tour. Offhanded homophobia was linked to bro-talk. Life was — well, life at that age. The cosmic misfortune of growing up uncertain about yourself in the newborn age of social media, the technological invention of festering self-doubt, is well within Chris’s summer of collisional questioning, including his infatuation with Madi (Maehala Park), his disintegrating friendship with Fahad (Raul Dial), impressing a group of older skater boys by faking camera skills, and the tectonic drift from his family. All to say: genuinely relatable.
Scenes of deceptive flirting maneuvers, dead squirrels, and farts make up Dìdi‘s charm, and I’m not one to turn my nose up against silly shenanigans. One of the film’s clever devices is its face-fronting usage of the Internet, where we watch Chris use Google and Facebook likes as a romantic advantage in grabbing Madi’s attention. If you were an anxious or lonely kid, there was nothing more catalytically educational than learning how to use the tools of the Internet to make your life as cool as possible, even if it is knowingly inauthentic offline. There is an excruciating conversation where Madi catches Chris in his lies of watching E.T. or Star Wars, which sorta plays as a kind of gender-inverse cuteness (because God knows what happens when a woman mentions their favorite director in a group of men!) that perhaps it’s not aligning interests but personality that makes better matches.
My strife, instead, is the lack of ties between the facets of Chris’s life. It’s not that they don’t intertwine; Fahad unleashes a fury of middle-school flirtatious texts to Madi, his mom (played by the ever-ethereal Joan Chen) meets the skater kids. But there is so much going on in his life that his problems don’t settle in before Chris nomadically jumps to the next adventure, laying disaster zones in the rearview mirror (and as I recall, there are only three months in the summer!). The characters surrounding him are enough to have one or two issues, but with these short stops, they feel like stepping stones to Chris’s coming-of-age, tender in its intention but lost in the bigger picture. I can feel the dread already sit in my stomach when one of the skater boys, in most to every scene that he appears in, kept bringing up how excited he was to see Chris’s video of them being chased by a cop. You can make a couple of guesses on what happens to the video.
Perhaps intentionally, Dìdi is a film about one with many faces to wear when we are ashamed of ourselves. Though not explicit as using racial slurs, Chris is troubled by his Asianness. Though he is surrounded by friends of color (who affectionally call him Wang-Wang), he lashes out against his mother (“God, you’re so Asian”) and at himself (he lies about being half-white). I presume that there is a small comfort in his identity at home when he speaks Mandarin to his grandmother (acting debut from Wang’s grandmother!) and wears his older sister’s clothing despite them fighting tooth and nail. The constant adaptation of someone to want to fit in could explain the short stops, but for a movie that looks personal, it has to take the time to get personal.
Unsurprisingly, Joan Chen’s character as the matriarch fending for her life in artistic solitude and family bickering makes as the most intriguing character. She gets the short end of the stick from Chris and his sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) as well as Chris’s grandmother, who chastises her for not holding down the fort while the patriarch works overseas. She gets the most screen time outside of Chris, but she is simultaneously the heart and a footnote, which reduces her to a long-suffering parent that we feel for. (Maybe, in a twisted way, Wang perfectly encapsulates how exactly how our parents’ love feel.)
I imagine that people will relate. I did! I utilized hellogoodbye as my default MySpace profile song, fought with my mom, and used the Internet to guide how I interacted with people. But to both relate and not feel together with the characters is the conundrum that I didn’t expect. I believe that Dìdi belongs to a soul, but not enough for me to want to get out my skateboard and fail at switch flips.
Dìdi
2024
dir. Sean Wang
94 min.
Opens Friday, 8/2 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
