(2024, 15) Focus Features
It’s 2008 and 13-year old Chris Wang is enjoying the last month of summer before starting high school.
Starring: Isaac Wang, Joan Chen, Shirley Chen, Chang Li Hua
Coming-of-Age
Sean Wang’s feature-length debut is a coming-of-age film from the POV of the East Asian (EA) experience. You may remember Wang’s #Oscar nominated Short “Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó” about the daily lives of his feisty grandmothers, who live together.
It’s the summer before Chris aka Didi 弟弟 starts high school. He lives in Fremont, California, with his mother (Joan Chen), grandmother Nai Nai (Wang’s real life grandmother Chang Li Hua) and warring sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) who is due to leave for college in San Diego. After completing junior high, he’s spending his time hanging out with his friends Fahad and Jimmy “Soup” Kim, whilst trying to get the attention of his crush Madi. After an embarrassing date followed by a disastrous crazy golf session, he finds himself drifting away from his previous friendship group.
Fitting In
Chris goes in search for somewhere else he can fit in; he comes across a group of skateboarders and offers to be their ‘filmer’. This leads him to delete all his existing YouTube prank videos and tear down all his room posters, to appear cool to his new friends. From there, his mother tries to help with studies and sends him to a tutor group, which ends up with him punching a fellow student, and we get to see Didi’s awkward journey to reconcile with his burgeoning teenage self.
All the coming-of-age traits are ticked off; what makes this different are the EA nuances which are captured perfectly: upon visiting Chris’s house, his skateboarder friends don’t take their shoes off; the competitiveness between Chris’s mother and her friend about how smart their sons are and then his mother losing face after the punching incident; the boiled egg to soothe Chris’s black eye which he promptly eats!
Watching the early versions of YouTube, online and text messaging brings back fond memories, trying to fake your birth year so you could open a Facebook account! The performances are excellent, especially Joan Chen who plays Chris’s mother trying to be a good parent (her husband works away in Taiwan), daughter-in-law and recapture of her dream of painting, which she gave up when she married and had a family. The soundtrack is also great capturing the sound and feel of the era.
This was just wonderful watch; some of the scenes made me cry as they were reminders of my own experience of trying to fit in and people-please my parents. If you get chance to catch it on it’s limited run here in the UK, it’s a sweet story which touches your heart.
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