The Wedding Banquet is a rare kind of remake. In revisiting Ang Lee’s queer 1993 dramedy of the same name, writer-director Andrew Ahn enlisted one of its original screenwriters, James Schamus, to bridge the gap between past and present. These are very different films, powered individually by the spirit of their time.
Lee’s film is carried on the backs of dreams: its central couple, Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) and Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein), can’t legally wed, so the marriage that does take place, between Wai-Tung and his tenant Wei-Wei (May Chin), is to satisfy his parents and secure her a green card. Understandably, the entire situation is tinged with melancholy. There is a constant ache of what might have been.
It’s a more tender, rooted film than Ahn’s, but his new iteration is rightly less interested in homage, and more interested in responding directly to its own moment. There are two queer couples this time: Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone), and the tenants in the shed at the bottom of their garden, Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-chan). All four of them live defiantly, in close communion with Seattle’s LGBT+ community, because the advances they’ve made now feel fragile and constantly under attack. The film, in response, plays as a more conventional romcom, still moving at times, but also sillier and more jubilant.
Min proposes to Chris, on what happens to be the same day his grandmother Ja-Young (Minari scene-stealer Youn Yuh-jung, back to steal more scenes) calls him up to demand he either commits to the family business or moves back to Korea. He’s the heir to a fashion empire and has kept his sexuality a secret to his family out of fear of their reaction. “You don’t work for the company,” he’s warned. “You are the company.” So, when commitment phobe Chris rejects him, Min instead proposes he marry Angela. She and Lee are pursuing IVF treatment, and, after several failures, their savings have run dry. Min can pay. Everyone wins, supposedly.
It’s a mildly absurd gambit, but most great romcoms involve one. Ahn and Schamus’s screenplay happily mines its extremes for funny one-liners, like when Angela’s performatively supportive mother (Joan Chen), fresh off winning a local allyship award, responds in horror: “My own daughter – marrying a man!” The film, here and there, does link back to Lee’s, updating its mission, for example, to “de-queer the house” for visitors. What once involved stashing away a VHS of Todd Haynes’s Poison, now involves copies of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women (which Gladstone happens to star in).
But for the most part, The Wedding Banquet is content to simply relax into the warm embrace of its cast. Yang and Han are more straightforwardly comedic, the former with his white-wine-dry sarcasm and the latter his bouncing ball enthusiasm. Tran ensures Angela’s hint of arrested development feels believable, while Chen’s smiles are sickly sweet.
Gladstone has the kind of hypnotic, easy cool that draws you in and instantly disarms you, while Youn achieves so much with silence, taking a somewhat taciturn character and sending her off on the film’s largest and most impactful emotional arc. The Wedding Banquet old and new may take different paths, but they end with the same conclusion: there is indefatigable strength in the chosen family.
Dir: Andrew Ahn. Starring: Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, Han Gi-chan, Joan Chen, Youn Yuh-jung. Cert 15, 103 minutes.
‘The Wedding Banquet’ is in cinemas from 9 May
