From the outside, Taiwanese-American director Sean Wang’s Didi is yet another coming-of-age drama, akin to, say, writer-director Anthony Shims’ Riceboy Sleeps, or writer-director Anthony Shims’ Smoking Tigers.
Sean Wang’s Didi (Chinese for younger brother, Hindi for elder sister!!!) is closer in spirit to Riceboy Sleeps than the other recent Asian experiences in American cinema.
As in Riceboy Sleeps, so too in Didi, the mother-son relationship of the Taiwanese family in America(California, to be precise) is at the core of the moving story. This time the story “moves” in most unexpected ways.
There is a bedrock of moving viability about the family relations, in the way the young protagonist Chris peddles his insecurities as a first-generation migrant and as a pubescent struggling with hormonal changes, in his family, especially his mother Chungsing Wang(the marvellous Joan Chen) and also his grandmother and sister.
The family dynamics in this part of the world are no different from what we know them to be in our country. Joan Chen, who is struggling to keep her family together, could be Nargis in Mother India or Nirupa Roy in Do Bigha Zameen.
Joan Chen and her screen son Chris (Izaac Wang) have two screenplay-defining sequences in a car, one that ends with much laughter as Mom has a flatulent moment, and the other ends with ugly recriminations. The two sequences are the keystones of this credibly contoured, admirably controlled drama, much of it taken from the director Sean Wang’s own immigrant experience.
On the deficit side, the key passages of time are achieved without punctuation so that there is no pause for us to absorb the moves that italicize the screenplay. Rather than focus on Chris’s domestic dynamics with his sister, the screenplay repeatedly takes him out into his wide circle of friends outside the comfort of his home, where he either plays the wide-eyed foreigner or the cool converted American.
A lot of Chris’ burgeoning acclimatization as a first-generation American from Taiwan emerges from his online interactions with friends. The story is set in the closing years of the 1980s when the computer had just started to take over lives. People still talked to each other and didn’t wish one another Happy Birthday on social media.