Anchored by a talented cast clearly having the time of their lives, Andrew Ahn’s new banquet is a bit of a treat.
The first explicitly gay film director Andrew Ahn ever saw was Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet. A comedy drama about a gay Taiwanese-American man who engages in a lavender marriage, it became the most profitable film at the U.S. box office in 1993 during the height of the AIDS crisis. Ahn was eight at the time, the tape borrowed from a video rental shop by his mother who wasn’t aware of its queer material.
Thirty something years after what would be a formative experience, Ahn has teamed up with James Schamus, the original film’s co-writer, for a remake which retains charm and pathos in spades while also illustrating just how much has changed for LGBTQ people in the intervening decades.
The most fundamental update is expanding the narrative to include a lesbian couple. Angela (Kelly Marie-Tran) and her partner Lee (Lily Gladstone) can’t afford to go through a final round of IVF, while Min (Han Gi-chan, a real discovery) needs a Green Card to avoid being sent back to Korea to inherit his family’s business empire. Min’s commitment-phobe boyfriend Chris (Bowen Yang) won’t put a ring on it so a plan is hatched for Min to marry Angela is exchange for paying for the IVF, only for Min’s grandmother Ja-Young (a wonderfully deadpan Youn Yuh-jung) to turn up on their Seattle doorstep to force a traditional Korean wedding upon the not so happy couple.
The set up is classic Hollywood contrivance and Ahn and Schamus have fun with some of the more farcical sequences. A montage of the quartet scrambling to “de-queer” their Seattle home is a predictable but fun homage to the original film that affectionately winks at its gay audience with glimpses of DVDs of Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Certain Women being banished. Anh also relishes in the pomp and absurdity of the wedding ceremony itself, with Min telling Angela approvingly that she looks like Padmé Amidala in her Korean wedding garb.
But where The Wedding Banquet really shines is in its characters, not only in its two romantic pairings that feel profoundly real, but also in subverting our expectations of its intergenerational relationships. Joan Chen gives a stellar comic performance as Angela’s mother, an overzealous queer ally who gasps “My daughter, marrying a man?!” with true horror, while Ja-Young is no fool, instantly seeing through Angela and Min’s fake engagement and actually helping them with the deception.
Making The Wedding Banquet relevant after the legalisation of gay marriage sounds like a bit of a fool’s errand. But instead of relying on a coming out narrative, bold in 1993 but somewhat tired today, Anh wisely focuses on the intricacies of long term queer relationships and presents alternative family structures with warmth, humour and poignancy, with only a few clunky plot machinations along the way.
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Published 9 May 2025
Remakes are usually a cause for alarm and The Wedding Banquet feels like it should be left well alone.
What an unexpected delight! Anh mostly nails the tricky tonal balance between earnestness and farce.
Not all of the humour lands but it's difficult to resist a film so unabashedly sweet and geared towards a queer audience.
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