The Wedding Banquet review: a joyous modern take on queer love

In 1993, Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet was quite groundbreaking. The film depicts a bisexual Taiwanese-American man, living a happy life with his American boyfriend, who must plan a heterosexual marriage to a Chinese woman in order to keep his homophobic parents off his back – and to get the woman a green card.

It’s not as groundbreaking as Lee’s 2005 film Brokeback Mountain, certainly, but it nonetheless significant for depicting a gay romance in a popular film. It also marks a key time in queer history before same-sex marriage was legalised: a time in which queer people had to go to great lengths to meet the heteronormative standards of society, or risk being outed and subsequently ostracised.

Nowadays, the concept of a ‘lavender marriage‘ (i.e. a marriage of convenience intended to cover up the stigmatised sexual orientation) in the progressive West is almost laughable.

So how to update the central conceit of The Wedding Banquet for a modern audience? For Andrew Ahn, who directed the newly released remake, the answer is more complicated and nuanced than you might think.

Watch the trailer for The Wedding Banquet:

The Wedding Banquet: canapes and cocktails to start

For starters, this version is a lot gayer. The main cast of characters consist of a lesbian couple – Lee and Angela (Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran) – who are undergoing expensive and ineffective IVF treatment, and a gay couple – Chris and Min (Bowen Yang and Han Gi-chan) – who start to come apart at the seams after a botched marriage proposal.

The four of them are best friends, and have a rather cute set up with the lesbian couple owning a house and the gay couple living in their shed.

While their ‘inciting incidents’ seem like a certain recipe for weepy drama, trust me: the funny moments come in droves, too. And I found it very refreshing that a movie about queer folk would talk so openly about parenthood, marriage, and work-life balance, and how each of those issues is diverse and nuanced for us.

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So, here’s how we get to the wedding: Min, the closeted son of wealthy South Korean business owners, has been set an ultimatum by his grandmother: take over the American branch of the business, or he’ll have to come back to Korea. After extending his student visa and living freely for seven years, his right to live and work in the US is coming to an end, with no hope of a helping hand from his family.

Desperate and scared, he proposes to Chris the next day – and while he insists the gesture is not just for a green-card, Chris nevertheless feels betrayed and hurt.

But all is not lost, when Min has the booze-inspired idea to marry Angela instead – an arrangement that will have a threefold benefit: get him the greencard, keep his conservative family happy, and get the women the money (courtesy of his generational wealth) to undergo IVF again.

As convoluted as it may seem, the narrative logic is pretty sound – and personally, I’m willing to suspend any amount of disbelief for a good ‘sham wedding’ trope. After all, what is a traditional marriage but a business merger between families? ‘What’s mine is yours’, right?

The Wedding Banquet: will you have the beef or the chicken?

The ‘simple’ plan between the four friends gets even more complicated when Min’s grandmother (Minari‘s Youn Yuh-jung) surprises them with a trip to America to meet his new ‘fiancee’. This turn of events forces the foursome to ‘de-gay’ the house in the 40 minutes it takes Min to pick her up from the airport.

It’s a certified banger of a scene in which yonic murals, Elliot Page’s memoir, Indigo Girls posters and a blu-ray copy of Portrait of a Lady on Fire are quickly tossed into a box and shoved into cupboards.

Ange (Tran) is then quickly dressed up in hetero cosplay, and Lee (Gladstone) and Chris (Yang) prepare to play a couple, too … which goes about as well as you might expect.

And naturally, Ange and Min won’t get away with a quick courtroom marriage license – it’s a traditional Korean wedding or bust, says grandma. Oh, what joy!

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The performances in this film are what really sell the absurd concept – and it’s the women that are by far the standouts. Lily Gladstone is especially wondrous, playing off the other cast members with a veteran ease and lifting up their acting game simply by being present in scenes.

Kelly Marie Tran, after having been so unfairly maligned by fanboys during her Star Wars days, brings a real gravitas to the exhausted Ange, a Chinese American lesbian whose mother (the luminous Joan Chen) has decided to turn her daughter’s sexuality into a PR tour for her own ego.

In a film that’s already tackling the numerous complexities of queer marriage, queer parenthood and more, it’s a marvel that it also has time to deal with what one might call ‘Pride Posturing’, i.e. using your LGBTQIA+ support as an attention-seeking tool while in actuality not supporting the queers in your life at all.

The character arc of Angela’s mother is a really well-done example of this, and Joan Chen holds her own in film that’s full of interesting narrative threads and big personalities.

While Han Gi-chan provides the biggest laughs as Min, Bowen Yang plays somewhat against type as the commitment-phobic Chris, the straight man to Min’s frivolity, delivering some of the more dramatic moments of the film. It’s nice to see him expand his ability beyond SNL pantomiming.

The Wedding Banquet: fruit and cheese

On the whole, The Wedding Banquet is an imperfect film. I found that it struggled with getting the comedy-to-drama ratio just right, and felt that it might have benefited from being a straight up drama feature. There are also lot of modern topics in here, and while most are handled deftly, a few moments fall flat – like the line where an older woman muses to Chris about her sons pansexuality.

It’s just too obvious about it being played for laughs. That being said, I had a wonderful time watching it, and it was the ending that I particularly adored.

This review will remain spoiler free, but I can say that I did not expect the final moments of the film at all, and I left feeling surprised and overjoyed. Andrew Ahn is a clearly capable director, and has managed the difficult feat of modernising an earlier text with flair, while also keeping four characters (plus a mother and grandmother) balanced and interesting, which each of their lives feeling real and lived-in.

Mazel tov!

The Wedding Banquet is in cinemas now.