Dìdi, the feature debut from writer-director Sean Wang and one of the best new films of the year, risks cliche from the jump by zooming in on a literal calendar on the wall. The movie begins almost exactly 16 years ago, on 29 July 2008, and ends a few weeks later. Fourteen-year-old Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) – “Dìdi” to his Taiwanese-American family, “Wang Wang” to his childhood friends in suburban Fremont, California, “bigwang510” to his handful of YouTube viewers – is frittering away the summer between eighth and ninth grade the way most kids did then: part online, part hanging out, and everywhere a minefield of hot and sticky feelings.
Wang knows this period well, and the semi-autobiographical film is chock-full of specifically 2008 references – Livestrong bracelets, Motorola Krzr phones, Paramore Riot posters. Chris’s headstrong older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), on the verge of leaving for college at UCSD, has a choppy bang haircut and low-rise plaid capris. His crush Madi (Mahaela Park) has a MySpace page decorated in the pastel shades of PB Teen that autoplays a Hellogoodbye song. On his desktop computer, Chris flits between AIM and YouTube and Google and the Microsoft XP login, all of which pixel-perfectly outdated.
