Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, in honor of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month, we’re revisiting Ang Lee’s 1993 rom-com The Wedding Banquet.
Family is a tricky thing. You love them, you hate them—and you literally can’t exist without them. They contain perhaps more drama, tension, love, depth, and meaning than any other relationships in our lives, and that’s without even getting into the queer angle of things. They make for a seemingly endless well of narratives, and a particularly fruitful catalyst point in romantic comedies.
The jump from family life to romantic life is, after all, one of the great schisms we experience as we grow up. Not to be overly reductive or traditional, but you exist in the former until you are ready to move on to the latter: You leave your family and take on your romantic partner.
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But what happens when the two don’t blend? What if your partner goes completely against everything your family taught you, or hoped for you? How can you reconcile the two? Is that even possible?
To celebrate the end of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and with the news of an upcoming remake, this week we’ll take a look at one of the seminal queer romantic comedies of the 1990s, Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet, a film that dares to ask those very questions.
The Set-Up
The Wedding Banquet follows Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) a Taiwanese immigrant in New York City living with his long-term boyfriend Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein). Although he is in a loving and committed relationship, Wai-Tung is still not out to his parents, who constantly harass him about being single and are trying to set him up on dating services.
To get them off his back, Wai-Tung decides to marry one of his tenants, Wei-Wei (May Chin), a broke artist from China about to get deported. She agrees to the arrangement in exchange for a green card. However, overwhelmed by excitement, Wai-Tung’s parents decide to unexpectedly visit their son and throw a lavish wedding banquet to celebrate.
At its core, The Wedding Banquet is a romantic comedy distilled to its purest form, with the ups and downs and traditional tropes one would expect. Wai-Tung and Simon have to pretend to be “just roommates” while his parents are visiting, and hide all of the aspects of their life that made them an openly queer couple. Wai-Tung and Wei-Wei must engage in all the culturally specific Chinese wedding rituals in front of what seems like hundreds of guests. And of course, Wai-Tung eventually does have to come out to his parents… but not before the wedding night leads to Wei-Wei’s unexpected pregnancy.
More Than A Rom-Com
On paper, it’s a simple, straight-forward, and even somewhat corny story. But what’s miraculous about it is the way that Ang Lee (and all the team working with him towards his vision, from the actors to the production designers) manages to infuse deep humanity, emotion, and nuanced conflict into the characters and their frankly outlandish situations.
Yes, the hook of the premise is about Wai-Tung having to pretend to be straight to please his parents. But at its core, the movie is all about reconciliation: Wai-Tung must reconcile two sides of himself that he had been keeping separate, his romantic life and his family life. His parents (each in their own way) must reconcile the idea they had of what their son’s life should have turned out to be, and what it actually is.
It’s about the reconciliation of two cultures and languages constantly exploding and clashing at each other (a good portion of the movie, if not the majority of it, is spoken in Mandarin Chinese). And in a broader, thematic sense, the movie wants to tackle a reconciliation between “traditional” values and a newer, more progressive set of beliefs.
A Family Affair
However, Ang Lee never places judgment on anyone or anything. He never categorizes a belief, or a person, to be better than another. He just shows a group of people attempting to understand each other as best they can, while trying to remain true to themselves without hurting the other.
There’s a deep empathy in the movie that makes it feel so revolutionary when paired with such a conventional genre. Rom-coms are so often distilled down to the good guys versus everyone conspiring against them, having clear and distinct sides, and reducing people into archetypes. But The Wedding Banquet fights against this at every turn, making sure we understand that every character has a valid and grounded perspective.
In the end, we still get the rom-com happily ever after, with Wai-Tung and Simon staying together, and deciding to help Wei-Wei raise her baby. We learn Wai-Tung’s father is actually semi-fluent in English and could understand his son’s real relationship from the start.
And although still conflicted about it, his mother is able to make peace with that knowledge. In the final scene of the movie, as she walks away from her son’s new family (although not in the form she had always envisioned), she is crying. Her husband asks her why. “Because I’m happy.”
Renewing Our Vows
The film became a critical hit at the time, launching Ang Lee to international recognition, winning all kinds of awards, including a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.
The upcoming remake will be directed by Fire Island’s Andrew Ahn, who co-wrote the script with James Schamus (one of the original writers) and will star Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran and Youn Yuh-jung. The little we know about it seems to shift the narrative towards a Korean family, with the queer couple being the woman that the gay man chooses to marry, and her partner. It looks to be more of a story inspired by the original rather than a full remake, which we embrace.
At the end of the day, the heart of this film relies not on its story (which, as we mentioned, is pretty by-the-numbers) but on the incredible humanity that is breathed into the characters. That’s the legacy we hope to see continued.
The Wedding Banquet is currently streaming via Amazon Prime Video / Freevee, Hoopla, Kanopy, and PlutoTV.
Related*
If you hate weddings, you might actually love these 6 queer wedding movies
With the dysfunctional family comedy “The People We Hate At The Wedding” landing on Amazon today, we’ve compiled a list of wedding stories with a queer bent that you’ll want to RSVP to immediately.
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