The Wed­ding Ban­quet review – an unex­pect­ed delight

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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