Of the movie genres, coming-of-age is, for me, the thorniest; it is a template that invites audience assent on the basis that its story components are poignantly funny because they are recognisably true – ie a quirky unrequited teen love followed by some kind of romantic resolution, crowned by the mature realisation that what really counts is friendship among your peer group. In fact, coming-of-age is in its way as artificial as horror or romcom or Japanese Noh theatre. Real life is far messier and more unsatisfying, and the resolutions of romance or friendship or relations with your parents won’t happen at least until your 20s, if at all.
This makes Sean Wang’s quasi-autobiographical Dìdi (Chinese for “kid brother”) an interesting variation on a theme; I like to think its teen angst and teen friendship is inspired by our own TV classic The Inbetweeners. The setting is Fremont, California in 2008, a world where Facebook is gaining ascendancy over Myspace and kids are uploading skating videos to YouTube. Like Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, this film uses the teen comedy Superbad as a huge pop-cultural marker. (The fact that Superbad stars Jonah Hill may conceivably be intended as a subliminal reminder of Hill’s own slacker-skater film Mid90s, a big influence here.)
