Dìdi (弟弟)
2024 · Directed by Sean Wang
Original language: English
- comedy
- drama
The story
In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can't teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.
What it’s like
Warm Southern California summer light, bleached and hazy, spills across suburban cul-de-sacs, skate parks and cramped apartment rooms filled with low lamplight and the glow of a family TV. The camera leans toward handheld intimacy, staying close to a restless thirteen-year-old's face and his skateboard's rattle on cracked pavement, with the 2008 setting carried in flip phones, MySpace-era clothes and a dusty, faded palette. Sound is mostly everyday: traffic hum, kids shouting, wheels grinding over concrete, with a light, bouncy score that rarely insists on itself. Tone runs funny and tender with a melancholy undertow, a feeling of hot afternoons and small awkward victories, and the pace is loose and conversational, drifting from one hangout to the next. Its people are a boy and his divorced, overwhelmed mother and older brother, slowly learning to see one another more clearly. The intensity is low: some profanity, teenage sexual talk and a few tense family arguments, but no violence or gore. It suits a lazy weekend, a late-summer afternoon or a reflective night alone, and fits viewers who want a gentle, observant coming-of-age story about family and growing up.
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