Sean Wangās Dìdi is the coming-of-age movie of the summer ā but why does the genre often hit harder when itās set in the past?
Everyone remembers an afternoon like the ones seen in Dìdi – Sean Wang’s achingly autobiographical love letter to his 2008 teenage self. Slightly too many kids crammed into a living room you can smell through a brick wall, hanging out without really knowing what hanging out means anymore. Summer sun bleeds through the curtains as the group extrovert repeats stand-up routines he’s seen on YouTube. As the sun gets lower, Superbad appears on a tiny TV. We don’t see who puts it on; on such occasions, no-one usually remembers anyway.
American Graffiti, which debuted at the Locarno film festival 51 years ago today, harks back to director George Lucas’ teenage years in the early sixties. The tagline on the film’s original poster reads: “Where were you in ’62?” Swap out the number, and it’s a marketing formula which would work for a hundred coming-of-age stories released since.
While the coming-of-age genre encompasses plenty of contemporary-set high school movies, from The Breakfast Club to Booksmart, the medium has a proud history of turning the clocks back to the filmmakers’ younger days. Dìdi continues this trend, turning the clocks back to the year writer-director Sean Wang turned 14. Far from appearing self-indulgent, however, this quirk of the genre only tends to amplify its charm. Rather than appealing to the kids currently going through the changes in the film, it’s often more powerful to view these changes from the perspective of the changed (that’s us old folks, if you were wondering).
Part of the beauty of the ol’ retrospective coming-of-age trick, too, is it allows things to get a little nastier. Dìdi opens with Chris and his friends exploding a neighbour’s mailbox. American Graffiti ends with a car crash. Stand By Me revolves around kids finding a dead body in the woods.
The time gap takes some of the jeopardy and swaps it for nostalgia. All this happened a long time ago, it says. We can laugh about it now. The objectively traumatising events on screen aren’t happening to modern-day kids ā they’re happening to us, and we turned out alright.
Stand By Me, based on Stephen King’s 1982 novella, The Body, defines the coming-of-age formula down to a tee. Set in the summer of 1959, director Rob Reiner and screenwriter Bruce A. Evans would both have been 12 years old at the time. King, who had set the original story in 1960, would have been 11.
That one-year shift from source to screen is more impactful than most equivalent time hops and, like many of the best coming-of-age stories, it’s really got nothing to do with the specifics of 1959 vs 1960 at all. In fact, watching Stand By Me, the film could just as easily have been set in 1986. The influence the story has had on everything from our memory of the decade’s biggest pop hits to Stranger Things would make you think that it was.
But there’s something more poignant about 1959 purely by dint of its last digit. The last year of a decade – any decade, really – has an especially nostalgic quality. It feels like the end of something, whether we know what it is or not. In Stand By Me, it’s the end of our characters’ childhoods just as much as the decade of suburbia and white picket fences.
There’s an innocence, too, in Dìdi, though its summer 2008 setting has more to do with historical specifics than Rob Reiner’s classic. Like Vietnam and 9/11 before it, it’s difficult to separate any late-noughties film from the financial crash just around the corner. Dìdi, more specifically, looks at the transition from MySpace over to Facebook – a move into a phase of the social media age we’re arguably still living through. Like all coming-of-age stories, change is just on the horizon – and it’s a change made extra poignant when the audience knows what it is.
Dìdi is in UK cinemas now.
