Sundance 2024 Reviews: ‘Dìdi (弟弟),’ ‘In the Summers,’ ‘A Real Pain’
In today’s Sundance 2024 review diary I look at three of the festival’s award winners in the U.S. Dramatic section: Sean Wang’s Dìdi (弟弟), which won the Audience Award and Ensemble Award, Alessandra Lacorazza’s In the Summers, the Grand Jury Prize and Directing winner, and Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, the winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.
Dìdi (弟弟) (Sean Wang)
Just a week ago, director Sean Wang was nominated for an Oscar for his documentary short Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó, which will hit Disney+ and Hulu on February 9. That film premiered at SXSW last year where it won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award. With his first feature film, Dìdi (弟弟), Wang is still on a winning streak.
Nestled somewhere between Eighth Grade, the Oscar-nominated doc Minding the Gap and PEN15, Dìdi (弟弟) hits all the right notes of the AIM age, My Space and Motorola Razr phones for its 2008 Bay Area-set story of Chris (Isaac Wang, a natural), a 13-year-old Taiwanese American kid trying to fit in, well, anywhere. The only boy in an all-female household (dad is away at work in Taiwan), Chris is combative with them all: his sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), who’s about to leave for college in San Diego, his bossy nǎi nai (Chang Li Hua, director Wang’s real-life grandma) and his wannabe painter mother Chungsing (a heartbreaking and phenomenal Joan Chen). Chris just wants to skate and film and find a way to crush on pretty girl Madi (Mahaela Park) without looking like a dork. His meatball-headed friends (who call him Wang Wang) are only into talking about getting laid and offering true mid-2000s digs like “camo shorts are gay!” and “your mom is gay!” He soon finds his lane with a new group of friends, skaters that want him to film them. They’re older but nicer than his old friends vibe for a while but his own insecurities get the best of him once again. Dìdi (弟弟), which translates to ‘little brother’ in Mandarin, hits a handful of familiar beats for a coming of age story but it’s focus and perspective on a young Asian American boy gives a unique look at identity, self-worth and growing up.
Grade: A-
Dìdi (弟弟) premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition section of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Special Jury Prize for Ensemble and the Audience Award. It is currently without U.S. distribution.
In the Summers (Alessandra Lacorazza)
In Las Cruces, New Mexico, two sisters – Eva and Violeta (Dreya Castillo and Luciana Elisa Quinonez, respectively) – meet their father Vicente at the small regional airport for their summer visit. They eat pizza for dinner every night, play in his big pool and play pool at the local bar he frequents. It’s all very picaresque until it’s not in Alessandra Lacorazza’s semi-autobiographical story that spans 20 years of visits. Vicente is played throughout by René Pérez Joglar (also known by his musical moniker Residente) in a performance of pure beauty and sadness, one of this year’s revelations at Sundance. But those early years of fun and frivolity start to make way for Vicente’s increasing addictions to drugs and alcohol and as they girls move into their teen years, now played by Allison Salinas and Kimaya Thais, their time with him becomes strained, the pool has gone unattended, murky green and covered in slime. The girls spend most of their time trying to figure themselves out away from their father, especially Violeta, a burgeoning queer girl crushing on her friend Carmen and fighting off comments like “She’s smart like her father she doesn’t need to look good” when he’s drunk with his friends. A car accident creates a divide that feels permanent, visual and metaphorical scars abound, and when the girls return for the final vignette (which are separated with Wes Anderson-style tableaus of things past and what we’ll see next) it’s Sasha Calle (Supergirl from The Flash) and Lio Mehiel (Sundance Breakout Performance winner for Mutt last year) and the veneer of their childhood is completely worn off. Their father has a new child, the pool her empty playground.
In telling a decades-long story swapping out actors as they age out, it can often be difficult to sustain an emotional connection as a viewer when the view keeps changing. But for Lacorazza, in her feature debut, and casting director Stephanie Yankwitt that’s never a problem. The casting is so spot on across the six actors playing Eva and Violetta that we never lose the thread. Each adopts exactly the right amount of affectations of the others (not to mention the visual casting is spot on) in an organic and believable way, even if Calle and Mehiel have a bit less to work with as their characters have essentially been fully established at this point. In the Summers owes a bit to Moonlight and Aftersun in its storytelling but carves out its own path in a way that spells a bright future for Lacorazza.
Grade: B
In the Summers premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition section of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize and the award for Directing. It is currently without U.S. distribution.
A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)
We all have that one friend or family member. The one who can absolutely light up a room when they enter it but just as fast suck all of the oxygen out of it. You love them and you hate them, in almost equal measures, measures they’re constantly changing, pushing. In Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain that’s Benji (a perfect Kieran Culkin), a loose, free spirit full of cutting barbs and ‘do as I say, not as I do’ self-righteousness. We meet Benji at the airport, sitting quietly and rather unassumingly, looking around at other travelers. His cousin David (Eisenberg) is frantically calling, unaware that Benji is already there. He’s been there for three hours, “you meet the craziest people at the airport,” he says. The two Jewish cousins are on their way to Poland after the recent passing of their grandmother, to pay respects to her last home in the country before fleeing to the United States. Once there, they hook up with a Holocaust remembrance tour led by very delightful Will Sharpe (The White Lotus) and includes the very welcome return of Jennifer Grey (Dirty Dancing). What unfolds is something as close to classic Woody Allen as I think we’ve gotten in some time; David is nebbish and lets himself be walked over by Benji (giving up a window seat on the plane, taking a shower after the long trip), who is often insufferably passive-aggressive, full of back-handed compliments and paradoxical behavior, all deftly handled by Eisenberg’s hilarious and sardonic script and agile directing.
On the first tour stop, the group is looking at a massive statue installation of the Warsaw Uprising and Benji thinks it would be a great idea to take posing pictures with them. David is hesitant, it feels disrespectful. But Benji’s charm brings the entire group on board with David stuck taking photos from five different cameras. Yet later in the trip, Benji freaks out about being in first class on a train to a concentration camp (understandable) and makes a ‘huge emotional ‘look at me!’ scene about it, following up later with another toward’s Sharpe’s James about being ‘too touristy’ and ‘academic’ with his readings. There is a brilliant balance Eisenberg, and Culkin, strike here. At a dinner late into the trip, Culkin makes an ass of himself yet again and away at the restroom, Eisenberg unleashes a flood of grief and frustration towards him to the group. “I hate him and love him, I want to kill him, I want to be him.” It’s among the most brittle and beautiful work of Eisenberg’s career. Another atop a roof, reminiscing with Culkin finds them both at the very top of their game. The somber visit to the camp is perfectly realized. Spectacular work.
I know it’s only the end of January but I don’t hesitate to say that I think A Real Pain will remain one of the best films of the year.
Grade: A
A Real Pain premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition section of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Waldo Salt Award for Screenwriting. It will be distributed by Searchlight Pictures later this year.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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