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computer, Chris flits between AIM and YouTube and Google and the Microsoft XP login, all of which pixel-perfectly outdated.
In less delicate and steady hands, this could feel like cheap nostalgia bait; mid-aughts revival is everywhere these days, and there’s something inherently navel-gaze-y about burrowing deep into the not-so-distant past. But as arranged in Dìdi, this scarily accurate hyper-specificity is transfixing, because it shows exactly what any former teenager understands: the things you love, the things you latch on to, the throwaway stuff you try on for an identity – in the case of many millennials, YouTube videos and AIM fonts and digital camera selfies captioned “just because (:” – didn’t just feel like everything. To someone going through it, like Chris, they were.
That Dìdi conjures that feeling at all automatically puts it in the canon of good films about the internet, of which there are few. It is notoriously difficult to translate the experience of the phone or the computer to cinema; for the most part, ironically, the less of our screens you put on-screen, the better (think 2010’s Social Network, one of the foundational texts for internet films, which barely shows the experience of being online at all). The vast majority of films which attempt to wrangle the digital world into narrative either tip into moralizing, fail to convince or end up in cheap simulacrum. I am still astounded by the number of films and TV shows that render texts or social media into chintzy, distracting on-screen graphics. Most TV and film that touch the online do so glancingly – a few texts or on-screen bubbles, a scroll through the dating app, dialogue mentioning Instagram or TikTok – in favor of humans moving and living on screen.
In depicting a barely teenage American child raised by a single parent – Chris’s dad is in Taiwan for work, so the burden of the household falls on his aspiring artist mother (an excellent Joan Chen) – Dìdi immediately recalls Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade (2018), the gold standard of realistic internet films. It also invokes recent TV hits depicting the humdrum humiliations of adolescence – Big Mouth, Life Sucks and Pen15; the latter, like Dìdi, delights in a specific, fetishized recent-ish time (the year 2000). Wang’s film goes deeper online than all of these, at some points taking on full desktop cinema – a style pioneered in much more serious fashion by the Russian-Kazakh director Timur Bekmambetov, in which the film essentially becomes a screen-recording. Chris’s cursor offers a tour of the millennial teenage brain, tracing relationships through wall posts, MySpace top friends and who’s on AIM at the same time; reading into captions and statuses laced with inside jokes you don’t know; Googling “how to have a first kiss”; attempting to reinvent yourself in real time by changing your duck face profile picture to a serious pout.
I am admittedly the exact age demographic for this hyperspecific portrait – like Chris, I also languished the summer of 2008 between middle and high school, attempting to navigate shifting cliques and acne in public and my peers’ digital selves in private. Like Madi, I probably also uploaded a Facebook album called “beach day summer ‘oh sevennn!’” For me, part of the thrill is Wang’s meticulous, painful accuracy, down to the exact spelling of “gangstahhh” children would say to fellow children at the time. (Chris’s friend Fahad chats him that he should shoot for Madi because she “has yellow fever fa shooo”; the racism amid their multiracial friend group feels so casual and sharp that I have to wonder if Wang saved his old AIM chats.)
But the film works for all ages, all slices of internet experience, because it also has a firm grasp on what makes a moving coming-of-age film, in the lane of Lady Bird or Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret – online and off, figuring out identity and difference amid people who love you but do not fully get you, not knowing what you don’t yet understand. For that to align with the world-opening whoosh of the internet is a special kind of rush.
Didi is out now in US cinemas and in the UK on 2 August
