Anticipation.
A slick teen rite-of-passage indie. Haven’t we heard this one before?
Enjoyment.
Sean Wang has all the textbook moves down pat, but next time he needs to develop some of his own.
In Retrospect.
Pleasant in the moment with some spry observation, yet wispy and instantly forgettable.
When you’re a teenager, you look to those you perceive as your social betters to shape and inspire the evolution of your own persona. Just as we watch 13-year-old Taiwanese- American Chris (Izaac Wang) gawping lustily at a female classmate, or trying to suppress an eager yearning to ditch his lame‑o pals and go skating with the big kids, or even trading rhetorical blows in a constant war against his mother and sister, we too see director Sean Wang eager to follow in the trail that others have blazed before him.
A neo-nostalgic period piece set during the heady social media frontier days of 2008, Dìdi is a standard issue, vignette-driven coming-of-ager that excels as an amusing observational diary while foundering as an engaging piece of narrative drama.
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As Chris wrestles with growing pains, the push/pull tug of his cultural identity and the morality that comes from early forms of internet shitposting, he hops from one awkward situation to the next with little worry for how those around him feel about his impulsive actions. Eventually, he’s self-schooled in some tough lessons and begins to better understand what it means to be a friend, a son and a brother.
There’s a breezy panache to Wang’s direction, and he’s very good at capturing the comic skulduggery of, say, early instant messaging apps. It’s a shame, then, that it doesn’t have an original bone in its gangly, hunched frame.
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