The Killers
Between Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, the seemingly never-ending V/H/S franchise, and even Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and is currently out in cinemas, anthology films are arguably having a moment. The appeal of such a project is understandable: why tell one single narrative when a director — or a series of directors — can offer a wide array of amuse-bouches, experimenting with form and storytelling conventions within the economy of a short, leaving viewers with a nice variety to enjoy. The options can certainly be enticing, but the drawback is always consistency: for every Memories, there are at least half a dozen Four Rooms, sinking proceedings entirely with misguided artistic judgment. To a reasonable degree, an anthology film is only as strong as its weakest segment, and thankfully, The Killers, a series of four shorts assembled by South Korean filmmakers Roh Deok, Kim Jong-kwan, Jang Hang-jun, and Lee Myung-se, manages its balancing act better than most. With a framework loosely adapted from the Ernest Hemingway short story of the same name — itself adapted into several features previously, most notably Robert Siodmak’s film in 1946 and Don Siegel’s in 1964 — The Killers is a sordid collection of hapless, opportunistic souls who come undone with streaks of graphic violence. It’s brutal stuff, but it also happens to be riotously entertaining, with the four filmmakers delivering one of the best pitch-black comedies of the year, offering laughs as often as winces.
The first segment of the group is “Metamorphosis,” which immediately plunges viewers into the criminal underworld and the unfortunate life of Wan-chul, whom we meet with a large hunting knife sticking out of his back. On the outs with his boss and barely escaping a violent confrontation with his life, Wan-chul seeks refuge in a bar, wherein the kindly bartender fixes him a drink. Of course, this is no ordinary bar, as the bartender and her clientele are revealed to be something much more vampiric in nature, and the fated Wan-chul appears to be next in line to join them. Shot alternately between a gorgeous monochromatic and seductively crimson color scheme, this is an appealing short to kick things off, with the only real complaint that it ends right when it feels like it’s just getting started. The second and best of the bunch is “Contractors,” an entry revolving around the world of hitmen. When a contract is placed on the life of a college professor, the job ultimately falls to the inept Kwon-su, who inadvertently kidnaps the wrong person with two of his buddies. “Contractors” is specifically The Killers most accomplished work with regard to tone, as Kwon-su’s assignment devolves into a tragicomedy of errors and mistaken identity. But there is also plenty of mordant humor to be found in the initial hiring process, as we witness the contract-killing ecosystem pass this job from one murder-for-hire to another, with the promised payday diminishing from the likes of $300,000 to $150,000 to $30,000 to $5,000 with each passing hand-off. A coda that informs us this actually occurred is icing on the cake.
Up third is “Everyone Is Waiting For The Man,” a masterful exercise in sustained tension. Two detectives stake out a bar, awaiting the arrival of a notorious criminal in order to apprehend him. Two tough-looking gangsters enter the same bar, also awaiting the same man. As the evening ticks away, the very person of interest they are seeking may already be among them, unbeknownst to all. With a visual design greatly inspired by Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, itself an inspiration from Hemingway, this is the most deliberately paced of the shorts, but it does feature a solid twist and builds to a spectacularly bloody payoff. The fourth and final segment is “The Killers,” aptly titled as it hems closest to Hemingway’s original short story, narratively speaking. And on formal terms, it’s the most dazzling of the bunch; director Lee Myung-se, arguably the most well-known of these four directors to international audiences, huffs the same fumes that made his 1999 Nowhere to Hide such a romp, gleefully tossing out every cinematic trick in the book in a single location, as a trio of intrepid diner workers are forced to endure the presence of two petulant gangsters — for some added humor, one character is named Smile but cannot physically smile, while another is named Voice but cannot physically speak. “The Killers” is also the slightest of the shorts, but undeniably the most enjoyable watch, if only to see what Lee will do next. Taken as a whole, then, The Killers is a wildly successful anthology experience that makes for a genuine hell of a ride, benefiting from being the rare instance of no bad apple in the bunch. — JAKE TROPILA
Credit: “Baby Assassins Nice Days” Film Partners
Baby Assassins Nice Days
The best action movie franchise of the 2020s is about a couple of teenage slackers who, when they aren’t being incredibly lazy, work as hired killers. The first Baby Assassins saw our heroes, Mahiro (Saori Izawa) and Chisato (Akari Takaishi), graduate high school and be forced, for tax purposes, to live together and find real jobs. The second (Baby Assassins: 2 Babies) saw them in need of jobs again, this time to pay their hitman insurance premiums and also for a gym membership they never used but still had to cough up for. Action scenes bookended those films, while the middle was filled out with the two girls simply hanging around, cracking each other up, and failing to fit into regular society, while a fuller world of weirdos — yakuza, boys, other killers, and the people who facilitate and clean up after killers — was filled in around them.
This third film, which premiered at the NYAFF before its local release, finds the girls, for once, not facing any financial concerns. Instead, they are on vacation to the beachfront area of Miyazaki on the island of Kyushu in southern Japan, where they are to perform a hit. That job gets complicated when another killer shows up to do the same thing. He’s a freelancer named Kaede, working outside of the hitman union structure, and so they’re tasked with killing the scab as well. Kaede is played by Sôsuke Ikematsu, who starred as the Shin Kamen Rider last year and also in Between the White Key and the Black Key, the opening film of 2024 Japan Cuts, the other big East Asian film festival taking place in July.
This entry in the series is more action-packed, by far, than either of the first two. It’s again choreographed by Sonomura Kensuke, and again mostly stands as a showcase for Izawa, the single greatest action movie star to emerge over the last decade or so. Dressed in baggy clothes with long bangs covering her eyes, Izawa affects a kind of skater aesthetic (she performs the finale wearing a Fugazi T-shirt), befitting her character’s Bartleby-esque slacker defiance. The clothes too enhance her fighting style, which is built around quick movements and feints, slithering in and around her opponent, into and out of clutches and wrestling holds, alternating with quick jabs, leg sweeps, and blocks. Izawa and Sonomura’s fights are lovely, fast, and fascinatingly tactical; they have a rhythm and logic to them that are exceedingly rare in mainstream cinema, and in English-language film almost only found at the margins, in the straight-to-video/streaming bargain bins. Takaishi acquits herself well in the fights too, but her role is largely as a shooter. It’s clear she’s more of an actress playing at being an action star than the real deal.
The fights are spread throughout Nice Days, rather than being confined to just the opening and closing, which means it plays like much more of a conventional movie than any of Sakamoto’s other films — which include A Janitor, a more traditional yakuza film wherein he first paired Izawa and Takaishi as assassins, albeit different characters, and Yellow Dragon Village, a very clever riff on the slasher film. There are action beats every 10-15 minutes or so here, with the in-between drama and comedy coming from the lone hitman’s deteriorating psychological state and the Baby Assassins’ interactions with their colleagues, respectively. None of this is as weird or exciting as the restaurant the girls’ worked at in the first film or Chisato’s street chess game in the second, but it’s still pretty fun and actually serves a thematic purpose, something Sakamoto was ambitious enough to avoid doing with the first two movies.
Mahiro and Chisato are joined by another pair of killers from their firm, a dim-witted but sweet bodybuilder and a hard-nosed older woman named Minami (played by Atsuko Maeda, star of Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s To the Ends of the Earth). Minami is seven or so years older than our heroes, but she’s appalled by their slacker manners and lifestyle, which she credits to the generation gap between millennials like herself and Gen-Z. Eventually, they all get along well enough to do their work, while Kaede, the solo artist, slowly goes insane. The message here is about the virtues of community, especially in the work environment. Chisato and Mahiro and Minami are all sociopaths, without a doubt, but they’re able to function thanks to their friendships and working relationships with other people. Kaede is just as much a sociopath, but without the backing of a union or a team of partners to look out for him and help him along the way, he loses his mind. He’s also being compensated horribly for his work, being told to kill 150 people for a measly paycheck. A strong union would never allow labor to be exploited in such a manner. Instead, its members even get a beach vacation every once in a while. And maybe even a trip to a nice restaurant to enjoy Miyazaki’s famous beef. — SEAN GILMAN
Snow in Midsummer
The titular expression of Chong Keat Aun’s sophomore feature, Snow in Midsummer, has a political signification beyond its outwardly meteorological imagery. In Guan Hanqing’s The Injustice to Dou E, a Chinese play written during the Yuan dynasty, snow in the peak summer month of June is one of three divine phenomena — alongside blood raining inexplicably from the sky and a drought lasting three years — to manifest following its eponymous character’s wrongful trial and execution at the hands of a corrupt court official… — MORRIS YANG [Read the full previously published review.]
12:12 The Day
“In the end, they swallowed up the nation as a whole.” The last lines of the epilogue intertitle of Kim Sung-soo’s 12:12: The Day roll on top of a faded, real black-and-white photo of the men behind the South Korean military coup d’état of December 12. The spotty and sickly monochrome image inserts the film’s events into both reality and the past — a distant past that can only be remembered without color. Of course, 1979 wasn’t that long ago and color photography had been around for several decades (even if it wasn’t the norm for photojournalism), and we know precisely the hues of general Chun Doo-hwan’s skin. Even the men enacting the coup are slightly removed from reality: Hwang Jung-min plays Chun Doo-gwang, not Chun Doo-hwan; Jung Woo-sung is Lee Tae-shin rather than Jang Tae-wan; the list could go on. The point of 12:12: The Day seems to be not to rehash the historical happenings of the fateful day, but to supplicate an image of the soul of Seoul as a resilient, brave, and honorable city with a population that fights for each other.
12:12: The Day begins with the news of the assassination of dictator president Park Chung-hee and a declaration from the bad guys that “the world is the same” as it was before, a comment that leans into viewers’ historical knowledge of what will happen: Major General Chun Doo-hwan will successfully stage a military coup and hold control of the lower half of the peninsula until 1988; his dictatorship will in short time lead to the Gwangju Uprising (a favorite democratic movement of Korean cinema (A Taxi Driver, 1987: When the Day Comes, & even the film that began the Korean New Wave in Peppermint Candy); and his tyranny will ultimately inspire the final push for a full democracy in South Korea. Kim’s film traces the change of the world as a line of continuity through President Park’s assassination and President Chun’s 1987 concession and to the democratic end that South Korea now enjoys. Brilliantly, he alludes to this in what might be the film’s lone shot of a civilian mass, one of cinema’s longest, strongest symbols of democracy, as the title card imprints. The bright sun grants the faces of the crowd anonymity, and through the anonymity, guides the viewer to see themselves in the crowd and see the Seoul of today as emerging from the political war that follows the title card.
Hwang is excellent as future President Chun. With a haircut seemingly inspired by Bad Ape from War for the Planet of the Apes and the mischievous smile of a youngest sibling, he plays the role with the right amount of wile and presumption to make the viewer despise the president and understand his chicanery without imbuing him with any charisma to succumb to. (No slander meant against Bad Ape.) Jung is likewise fantastic in his role, imbuing Lee with the professionalism and distinction of a leader worth following even when the odds aren’t in their favor. His commitment to an ideological cause of an apolitical military feels refreshing in a global cinema where protagonists can’t escape political allegiances. The film also feels globally relevant right now. Earlier this month, former President Trump narrowly avoided assassination, and an American Civil War hasn’t been too difficult to imagine for almost any American in a swing state for quite some time now. The political loyalties of a military’s generals, like it or not, are likely the difference between a coup d’état and democratic continuity.
One of 12:12’s most exciting scenes is a game of phone tag, with both sides searching for the missing Minister of Defense. The military is in utter chaos, and his signature leaves behind a regime-saving currency with the ink. Kim Jee-woon’s frequent DP Lee Mo-gae (I Saw the Devil, The Good, the Bad, the Weird) employs split-screen on a few occasions, in addition to the fast-paced cutting of Korea’s greatest editor Kim Sang-bum (Oldboy, The Handmaiden, The Attorney, Decision to Leave), to augment the chaos of the moment and make it impossible for the viewer to fully track everything. Phone tag has simply never been this suffused with adrenaline — and it probably won’t be again for quite some time: it takes a filmmaking crew as skilled as this one to unlock that potential.Kim’s most notable previous film was 2013’s quasi-isolationist The Flu, and, regardless of whatever the director’s real-life politics are, it’s fairly easy to construct a politically conservative image of the filmmaker from just these two films. The image of Lee Tae-shin playing chicken with the entire 2nd Airborne on the bridge about to enter Seoul is the stuff of right-wing fever dreams: the good guy with the gun standing up to the bad guy with the gun. It’s never clear if Lee is actually a good guy with a gun or just a principled military general committed to an apolitical military; after all, he did serve the dictator President Park for a decade and a half. Regardless of the political implication, however, the lone wolf putting his body between an entire brigade of tanks and armored cars and the city of Seoul will rouse even the most ideologically ambivalent of viewers. It’s a great non-action action scene. The film’s runner-up for best sequence, the climax, offers another armed face-off where neither side ends up firing out of fear of starting a civil war where the Korean people will pay the consequences (and also out of a fear of an invasion from the North). 12:12’s “action” scenes, then, bear the tension of real action confrontations, but very little in the way of actual violence. The threat of escalation keeps fingers off triggers — though Lee does everything he can, including briefly taking Chun in his pistol’s crosshairs before dropping the gun, to prevent the rise of a dictator. Somewhere in the film’s established middle ground between prevention and hesitancy, Kim makes the rebellious apolitical general into a hero, which is fully a testament to his superb direction. On paper, Lee scans as a coward. On screen, he’s a legendary precursor to democracy. — JOSHUA POLANSKI
Snow Leopard
The late Chinese, Tibetan minority filmmaker Pema Tseden is no stranger to the Western international film festival circuit (which is also the case for many other films of similar ethnic specificity from the Middle Kingdom). This writer has enjoyed the opportunity to cover various prior films of this type within the setting, from Pema’s own Jinpa (2019 NYAFF) to the Inner Mongolia-set Anima (2021 NYAFF), and Snow Leopard — which received its North American premiere at this year’s TIFF — sits comfortably within the genre-specific framework… — MATT MCCRACKEN [Read the full previously published review.]
Credit: 2023 Mise en Scene Film Production
All Shall Be Well
All Shall Be Well opens with a leisurely, near-fantastical tour through what appears to be a typical 24 hours for Angie (Patra Au) and Pat (Li Lin-Lin), the middle-aged lesbian couple at the center of Ray Yeung’s latest film. Not only are they excellent hosts with a perfect home, their way of spending time together is a seemingly effortless exchange of sensitivity, from quiet mornings to encounters with neighbors and, in the culmination of this sequence, their presiding over a glowing, rich evening meal for the Mid-Autumn Festival, to which Pat’s extended family is invited. As might be suggested by the vaguely encouraging title of the film, this domestic paradise comes to an abrupt end, with a sudden offscreen death; what’s more surprising about this development though is how Yeung discards many of the options normally taken by grief narratives.
The once-pervasive idea undergirding queer romantic tragedy was the freighted assumption that queer romance by its nature carried tragedy with it, either as a symptom or a diagnosis. Yeung’s film doesn’t exploit or transmute that idea, nor does it borrow its frame for revisionist or melodramatic purposes. Instead, the film uses death as a way of turning a self-sustaining relationship into an objective case for examination.
Objective might sound like a strong descriptor, but Yeung introduces the key details of Pat’s death that we learn after the film’s opening as legal matters, a life flattened into the hard residual on-paper details left behind. No scene, whether a meeting with a burial advisor, an appointment with a will executor, or a gathering at the funeral itself, admits any but the barest sentimentality. These collisions with familial and marital definitions directly bear out the way the full rights of a lesbian couple in the seemingly open Hong Kong of the film’s opening can be, with minimal effort, treated disposably, but neither does Yeung freight his thesis in the manner of a filmmaker like Ken Loach, for whom illustrative societal conflicts serve as dramatic machinations.
Rather than a central conflict, scenes are treated as occasions for casual interactions, as relatives strategize how to deliver news (callous requests build upon one another, to the point of eviction), and friends wonder how to act around a grieving Angie. It’s a treatment that results in little connective tissue between successive scenes, with the emphasis instead placed on the way every possible encounter contains the possibility for aggression, a reversal of the potential warmth in every step of the film’s opening.
This slippage of the film’s gravitational center is compelling enough to sustain the film, even if there’s little interest in the film’s gentle, unobtrusive mix of establishing shots and drifting medium close-ups. If anything, All Shall Be Well, especially in its final scenes, is about what can’t be easily observed, for Angie’s narrative is a free-fall experience of constant doubt where nothing can any longer be taken on trust, or at face value. Because of the legal ramifications of Pat’s death, this is an experience that seems to stretch on for months, if not longer, and the film, despite a fleet running time, studies this state long enough that it becomes etched into Angie’s face.
Not only is she forced to face the idea that, to the legal powers that be, she is a non-entity, but that the only possible way of keeping Pat’s memory alive is through invention outside of the closed circuit of the immediate family. When she meets friends in one late scene to mark and remember Pat’s life, there are no ashes, no official ceremonies, and no solid tokens of her existence as Angie knew her.
Yeung might not be a director who can take this kind of moment and render it completely transformative, but he does know how to conceive a film motivated not by emotional appeals common to the pop-psychology narrative of the grieving process, but rather the flux of everyday volatility. One wonders if an evenly-paced, clearly mapped-out approach limits what Yeung is able to accomplish within these parameters. But this register seems to be one of the most intentional parts of the film: it seems important to Yeung that All Shall Be Well is able to hint at a nightmare scenario, without fully exploiting that plot. While Angie is constrained by her circumstances, the film has a surprising amount of freedom in how it navigates those constraints, which is no small thing in an otherwise often deterministic genre. — MICHAEL SCOULAR
Exhuma
Director Jang Jae-hyun’s new supernatural thriller Exhuma covers a lot of ground during its two-plus hour runtime; what begins as a detailed procedural gradually gives way to ghostly possession, demonic resurrection, and eventually a pointed examination of the bitter history between Imperial Japan and South Korea. Indeed, the exhumation of the title is not just referring to literal description of digging up bodies (although there is plenty of that) but also an excavation of a historical trauma. There’s a lot to chew on here, but at least Exhuma is never boring… — DANIEL GORMAN [Read the full previously published review.]
Brief History of a Family
The A24ification of world cinema continues apace with Brief History of a Family, a dreary Chinese genre exercise that premiered earlier this year at Sundance. Essentially an umpteenth riff on Pasolini’s Teorema but filtered through the antiseptic upper-middle-class environments of Parasite, Brief History distinguishes itself only by virtue of its implicit connection to 20th-century Chinese history. In the aftermath of Mao’s disastrous one-child policy, the otherwise normal relations between would-be siblings take on an air of perversion and menace.
This is the story of Yan Shuo (Sun Xilun), a sullen underclass loner who becomes friends with a somewhat well-to-do classmate, Tu Wei (Lin Muran). Wei is a bit of a failson, drifting without purpose and interested in little else beyond video games. After Shuo and Wei meet at school following an accident during gym class, the quiet, awkward Shuo begins insinuating himself into Wei’s family. According to Shuo, he lives alone with his abusive alcoholic father, and Wei’s parents gradually begin to feel protective toward him. As a kind of blank slate, Shuo is the perfect screen onto which the couple can project their desires. Mrs. Tu (Guo Keyu), a former flight attendant, feels that her youth and beauty have slipped away from her, while Mr. Tu (Zu Feng) is a microbiologist who cannot inspire any sort of work ethic in his own son.
Given the recent release of Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, another Teorema manqué, to be sure, it’s tough not to implicitly compare Brief History with that cum-stuck portrait of a sociopath. The plots of both films are almost exactly the same. Poor kids are dangerous because they lack the refinement that privilege inculcates. Director Lin Jianjie, making his feature debut, doesn’t have all that much to contribute to this wan moral, aside from slow zooms and underlit interiors. The film offers chilliness but little else, suggesting a studiously empty Kiyoshi Kurosawa impression. By the time Brief History drifts toward its strangely inconclusive finale, you might find yourself wishing that this particular history had been even briefer. — MICHAEL SICINSKI
Credit: Sonatina Film Limited
The Lyricist Wannabe
Norris Wong’s first feature film, My Prince Edward, was one of the better Hong Kong indie movies of recent years. It starred singer/actress Stephy Tang as a young woman caught between East and West, Hong Kong and China, one man and another. Wong avoided all the expected turns of a scenario that could have made for either a romantic comedy or a bleak tragedy, instead opting for a mood of unstable melancholy, a frustrated despair that matched her lead character’s distress and, metaphorically, if you like, the state of Hongkongers in general in the late 2010s. The Lyricist Wannabe is her follow-up, coming five years after that promising debut — in between, she co-wrote the 2022 Wong Hoi anthology film Let It Ghost; Wong also produced the new movie. It likewise obstinately refuses to fit into any neat category, and also features Stephy Tang (albeit in a brief cameo), but otherwise seems to have little in common with the earlier film.
Chung Suet-ying stars as Law Wing-sze, an aspiring lyricist. We first meet her in high school, where she and her friends rewrite popular melodies with their own lyrics. She decides she wants to do this for a living, and spends the next several years trying to break into the industry. Along the way, she learns some of the theory behind writing Cantonese song lyrics, which is more difficult than Mandarin, Korean, or English because of the large number of tones in Cantonese. If the tone doesn’t fit the melody, either the meaning of the word changes or the music gets messed up. In between going to college and working PA and internship jobs, Sze sends out requests and gets some work writing lyrics for demos, but every time she seems to come close to breaking through, something happens to mess it all up.
Notably, Wong never asserts that Sze is particularly good at her craft. The lyrics we see seem to have potential, but are all kind of missing something, or have an awkward word or phrase that disrupts what should be the smoothness of a pop tune. This may simply be because of the English subtitle translation, but it seems intentional on Wong’s part, because her movie is not about “The Lyricist” — it’s about “The Lyricist Wannabe.” What’s important about Sze is not her writing, but the fact that she has this wildly improbable dream of artistic achievement that she works at for many, many years but never actually achieves. Sometimes her failures are because of her ability, but they’re also just as often matters of bad luck or timing.
When Wong visualizes Sze’s ambitions, she uses animation, childlike drawings of animals and rainbows and stars and such, the dreams of adolescence. As she gets older, these fade away into hard realities: complicated romantic relationships, conflicts with bosses, the need to find a real job. Sze doesn’t really have an idea she wants to express, a vision of the world she needs to put into words, or any real interest in writing or poetry outside of pop lyrics (notably, she studies biology in college, a field totally unrelated to her supposed life goal). Her lyrics are mechanically chosen to fit the melody of the songs she is given by other composers, but they rarely seem to have any personal meaning to her or her life. She’s not like the bus driver in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, quietly making terrific little bits of art out of the world around him. She would very much like to be that person, and she’s not completely without ability — she wins a lyric-writing contest, multiple composers tell her they like her work, etc. But by the movie’s end, she hasn’t gotten there yet and seems to have all but given up. Maybe, she says, she could have worked harder. Maybe she will. — SEAN GILMAN
The Roundup: Punishment
Four films into any series, you either change or die, and the copaganda finally outruns the action choreography in the fourth installment in The Roundup series. The wild box office success of the series, the most successful action enterprise in the history of the South Korean box office, will survive at least a bit longer, and that’s to the credit of the filmmakers, or perhaps the series’ showrunner and leading man Ma Dong-seok (as Detective Ma Seok-do). This time around, the now dried-up formula of gangbusting reinvigorates faintly with the introduction of limitations to Seok-do’s fists… — JOSHUA POLANSKI [Read the full previously published review.]
Didi
Growing up is a complicated mess. That has always seemed to be the primary message behind most — if not all — coming-of-age films about teenagers, regardless of the decade they’re set in. Writer-director Sean Wang (who earned an Oscar nomination earlier in the year for his short Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó) attempts to make his mark on the genre with his first feature, Dìdi. Set in sunny Fremont, California, in 2008, Dìdi charts that fuzzy transitional period between middle and high school, à la Bo Burnham’s seminal Eighth Grade. And like in that film, Dìdi tackles technology and social media and how they directly impact these young lives. However, Wang (a second-generation Taiwanese-American) also filters his story through a personal and often unsugared lens. It’s a funny and nostalgic crowd-pleaser — it won the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance — but it also achieves a certain solemnity, registering as a more contemplative film than one might expect from the coming-of-age format.
It’s the last month of summer vacation for 13-year-old Chris (Izaac Wang). His best friends Fahad (Raul Dial) and Jimmy — a.k.a. “Soup” (Aaron Chang) — call him “Wang Wang.” To his mother, Chungsing (Joan Chen), he is “Dìdi,” an affectionate Mandarin nickname translated as “little brother.” With her husband in Taiwan, Chungsing has to hold down the fort and care for her family, which includes Chris’ grandmother (Chang Li Hua) and older sister Vivan (Shirley Chen), who is about to head off to UCSD. The two siblings fight and bicker a lot, though they have one obvious thing in common — they both think their mother is embarrassing, in the way teenagers often do. Meanwhile, Chris has a crush on Madi (Mahaela Park), and his strategy to get close to her includes saying he likes Paramore and Nicholas Sparks films. He also begins to hang out less with Fahad and “Soup” and gravitates more toward some older skater boys, offering to film them doing tricks. And so it’s established early that this will be a pivotal summer for Chris as he learns how to skate, kiss girls, and love his family — and all on his own.
Dìdi toes a line between the distinct and the universal. The film is sketched with details that are uber-specific to 2008: Myspace pages, Paramore’s Riot!, AOL Instant Messenger, flip phones, and Superbad — the late-2000s nostalgia is palpable. Other aspects are quite familiar and synonymous with the coming-of-age genre: awkward first crushes, braces, complex and sudden changes to previously vital friendships, trying alcohol and weed for the first time. Both veins tie into Wang’s presentation of the crushing — or, perhaps more sitting since Paramore features so heavily in the film, the crushcrushcrushing — weight of growing up. Chris is an unruly kid; the first time we encounter him is as he films himself blowing up a stranger’s mailbox and posting the video on YouTube. He is stubborn and ungrateful toward his mother, talking back to her often. Yet, we also see the insecurity, a socially awkward and arguably desperate teen, habitually acting like someone he isn’t in order to impress others. This leads to him soon ditching the old childish YouTube videos he made — and his “Wang Wang” nickname — so that he might better fit in with Donovan (Chiron Denk) and co., but as he will find out, you’re not older just because you hang out with older kids.
Dìdi’s scenes of skateboarding youth immediately bring to mind films like Mid90s and Minding the Gap, but at the same time, Wang is clearly melding these reference points with the more personal, drawing on his own experiences to survey themes of Asian identity, cultural differences in these Fremont suburbs — Chris partly hides his heritage so he doesn’t have to be called “Asian Chris” — and tiger mom-encouraged academic pressures. Wang even shoots in his childhood home, and features his grandmother Chang Li Hua (also one of the stars of Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó) in a role. Add to that Chris’ burgeoning interest in filmmaking, and it’s hard to shake the impression of the semi-autobiographical (Wang would have been 13-14 in 2008). This intimacy moves Dìdi more toward something like James Gray’s Armageddon Time, which likewise documented a chapter from its director’s youth and proved willing to expose the more brattish, malicious sides of its main character rather than delivering only a stylized coming-of-age type.
In fact, there’s the lingering question here of whether Chris goes too far at times. His pranks on Vivian certainly go over the edge, and his words to her and Chungsing can be needlessly cruel. Even the skater friends he’s so determined to impress think he’s too harsh to his mom. Does this make Chris an unlikeable character? No. He’s simply a recognizable teenager, dumb and careless but not unfeeling. It’s a genuinely fleshed-out, three-dimensional characterization, one that may have benefited in some regards from pushing this even further, but what weaknesses do arise are mitigated by Wang, his performance so natural that it’s hard not to feel deeply for Chris, foibles and all. He can be stinging and unsympathetic in one moment, only to then reveal a wealth of palpable pain. Chen delivers a similarly rich performance, her Chungsing a woman of past ambitions and dreams, and the question of what might have happened if she hadn’t met his and Vivian’s father. Would she have made it to America and become an artist as she wanted? How different would life have been? But when Chris asks her if she is ashamed of him, this selfless woman tells him simply: “You are my dream.”
This scene is indicative of Dìdi’s genuinely moving nature, a quality that helps Wang’s film stand out within a crowded genre. Its deep feeling is buoyed by a great sense of time and place, detailing youth through the desktop computer screen and the weird glory years of the Internet before it collapsed in on itself. The teenage dialogue is likewise so realistic that it feels almost as if it could be an alien language, and Wang’s careful direction is inventive without ever distracting with overstylization. And it’s precisely this care — for craft, for character, for detail — that proves to be the film’s greatest achievement, capturing Chris’ complicated navigations of passions, friendships, and family with intimate clarity, and making his recognition of home’s warm embrace all the more moving. — DANIEL ALLEN
