Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.For many people, 2008 still means the year of the global financial crisis. Or like Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) in the bittersweet coming-of-age Dìdi, you may have been 13 at the time. In that case, your memories will likely run more to agonising social blunders than the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Such is the privilege of youth. You don’t need to know the banking system has gone haywire to be consumed by anxiety.There are a lot of social blunders in Dìdi, in which melancholy comes wrapped in a larky package. Like his protagonist, writer-director Sean Wang was 13 the year his story is set. And — snap! — he was also a Taiwanese kid growing up in Fremont, California. No shock, then, to sense autobiography at work amid the more generic details of early adolescence. (Braces are fitted inside five minutes.)Out of school over summer, one day can seem much like the last. In fact, of course, everything is changing. The need to find a girlfriend is urgent, but even that is only part of a bigger issue: the frantic setting aside of childish things in search of a teenage identity. For Chris, that process is made more complex by his Asian heritage. (In diverse Fremont, his ethnicity is barely noted until, jarringly, it is.) Much weight comes to rest on the question of what he will even call himself. Is Chris really Chris? Or still Wang Wang, his middle-school nickname? Or even Bigwang510, the alias under which he posts rascally YouTube videos? (Has any lesson in the digital age been harder learned than the deathless nature of a hastily conceived social media username?) Even language is limited help in pinning down his place in the world. At home, Chris speaks English to his mother, Chungsing (Joan Chen, terrific). But she replies in Mandarin and, like the rest of the family, calls Chris “Dìdi”, the Chinese term for “little brother”.But Wang is intrigued by other languages too. In social media terms, 2008 is prehistory. In Dìdi, we even see people under 50 posting on Facebook. Mostly, through, the teen friendships here live and die on the clunky interface of AOL Instant Messenger. The highest drama unfolds in the evolving shorthand of online conversation, for which the film has a very sharp eye.You leave wondering what emoji might best capture Dìdi. For all the comic pizzazz, the movie has a sadness at the centre. The prankiest scenes end in mournfully realistic social disaster. And if the 2008 crash does not intrude, signs of the times are still visible. In his awkward, tortured IM exchanges, we could actually call Chris a pioneer: one of the first among the zillion modern teenagers whose inner pain would soon become the stuff of Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok.★★★☆☆In UK cinemas from August 2 and in US cinemas now
