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The coming-of-age story has a fairly consistent structure: A young person living a difficult home life must learn to grow past certain obstacles, including possibly forgiving their parent(s), if they hope to reach maturity. Two films in Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Competition are trying to retool the genre through different eyes. In the case of “Didi,” it’s the Asian-American experience. In “In the Summer” it’s a Latinx family. Both films also frame structure and tone. But only one film keeps the desire for one generation to understand the other, usually the life blood of the genre. The other film’s avoidance of a similar want can be felt to debilitating results.
Between “The Farewell,” “Minari,” and “Past Lives,” lately, Sundance has been a launching pad for Asian American cinema. Even “The Minding the Gap,” the film that most comes to mind when watching Sean Wang’s highly personal skater film, “Didi,” traces its roots to the festival. “Didi” isn’t a scratch on those works, but there is an affecting, albeit, thinly conceived story at its heart.
Wang’s coming-of-age narrative opens with Didi (Izaac Wang)—some call him either Wang Wang or Chris—shakily running with a camcorder away from an exploding mailbox. At 13-years-old, Chris, who lives in Fremont, California, is at that age when boys can be one part mean and another part psychotic. He and his sister Vivien (Shirley Chen), who’s departing for college, are constantly bickering (he inflicts a couple heinous pranks on her). His father is away, working in Taiwan, leaving Didi’s mother (Joan Chen) to care for her mother-in-law (Chang Li Hua), who thinks she is unworthy of her son’s affections.
Though it pains me to label any film set in 2008 a period piece, “Didi” captures the first social media generation well, integrating AIM, Myspace, and Facebook to show how technology intermingled with these young teens’ social dynamics. Chris, for instance, has a crush on Madi (Mahaela Park), but speaking and interacting with girls isn’t a strong suit (talking with his mother isn’t either, for that matter). While these scenes of young adoration are sturdy, the interpersonal dynamics within Chris’ family are underwritten. This is the rare instance of a film probably needing another fifteen minutes, especially in the case of “Didi,” to wholly land its themes.
“Didi” is a conventionally shot film, save for a few surreal swings that make you wish Wang pushed the visual envelope. It’s also a work that lives and dies on the performances by Wang and Chen, especially as Chris begins to fall in with an older crowd, causing him to lash out, experiment with drugs, and even turn violent. Thankfully, Wang and Chen are up to the task, trading aching barbs with healing words. They’re enough to give this film a hint of sweetness and warmth, even when Wang is working too hard to conjure crowd-pleasing tears.
“In the Summers” is a handsomely mounted film whose highly calibrated structure left me feeling distant from a single father and his bumpy relationship with his two daughters. With her debut feature, writer/director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio tells a four-part story: It takes place in Las Cruces, New Mexico, when Vincente (Residente) picks up Violeta (Dreya Renae Castillo) and Eva (Luciana Quinonez) from the airport for their summer visit. He is separated from their mother and nervous to see them. Their first summer together is nearly perfect. Vincente lives in a snug adobe home, inherited from his mother, adorned with cozy, lived-in furniture and a pool—sights lovingly shot by DP Alejandro Mejía. Vincente teaches them about the universe and stars, and how to shoot pool. In the film’s successive chapters, the ideal summer devolves into a harsher stream of disappointments and aging.
Samudio’s script attempts to work poetically, but in the abstract she loses a sense of intimacy. This is a film of effects: Each time Violeta and Eva return for the summer, we witness their reactions to the events that have occurred in the passing years. But we never see them living through their father’s travails: He develops a drug habit, becomes cold to his youngest daughter Eva in favor of his oldest Violeta. The latter goes through a sexual awakening, becoming a lesbian, while Eva, separately, loses her innocence. Deeper problems with the family are implied, particularly alcoholism, but Samudio dances around directly confronting them. She also relies on a cliched tragedy to form a turning point, another instance that reaches for easy transformations rather than integral character building.
The distance viewers might have from the family is compounded by an elusive narrative where a father doesn’t wholly work to understand his daughters, and they don’t work to understand him. “In the Summers” has the look of a better film, and the actors, especially the organically composed Residente, give more than the script offers—but this Latinx family is more a bundle of difficult events than a tangible story of people learning to empathize with each other in the face of their growing pains.
