The Chinese Zodiac attributes personality traits and fortune by your birth year, but film lovers might find a little more zest in looking up their year’s film releases. Thankfully, 1993 was a good year for pan-Asian representation. Wayne Wang’s The Joy Luck Club, an adaptation of your mahjong auntie’s favorite book in the late ‘80s, was released that year. Vietnam’s biggest movie, The Scent of Green Papaya, a reimagined portrait of the country in tranquility, had made big international splashes in France before coming over to challenge Oliver Stone’s Western lens. Hailing from Hong Kong, Farewell My Concubine set the world ablaze from performances by Leslie Chung and Gong Li.
Ang Lee’s sophomore film, The Wedding Banquet, was the third Asian-led contender for Best Foreign Language at the Oscars alongside The Scent of Green Papaya and Farewell My Concubine. As the world will soon find out, Lee will reveal his belt bangers in the future. Still, The Wedding Banquet did not play around. A film in the ‘90s about a bisexual Asian man as the main character (and not caricature)? Acceptance towards unconventional nuclear families? Ain’t no freakin’ way.
Thirty years later, Andrew Ahn takes the hot seat in modernizing an already-edgy rom com. It may be a tough task, but Ahn, who approaches lust and internal brokenness with a subdued approach, lets this generation’s fear of indecisiveness become the biggest hurdle. Co-written by Ahn and one of the original screenwriters James Schamus, the film’s new antagonist reflects one of life’s conundrums: we have the ability to do more things than our previous generations — meet more people, mind our mental health, etc. And still, life is not so easy.
Kelly Marie Tran and Bowen Yang make up the film’s two uncertain brain cells in their romantic lives. Their characters, Angela and Chris, are coupled up with their respective loving partners but can’t seem to firmly plant their feet when it comes to planning for the future. Angela and her partner Lee (Lily Gladstone, who needs to be in more comedies immediately) are trying for a baby via IVF. After their second attempt fails, they struggle with the financial doom of trying again, but Angela is more burdened with the prospect of being a bad mother. Chris and Min (Han Gi-chan) have been together for five years, but distance between them widens when Chris reject’s Min’s marriage proposal. While the request may have been expedited by Min’s visa expiration, the reasons for Chris’s hesitancy goes beyond just timing.
In a thought process that is reasonable in the rom com universe, Min then proposes to Angela instead, offering her enough money for the next IVF appointment if they proceed with the wedding. Normal hijinks amongst friends (Lee: okay with it!; Chris: in his feels), but things get haywired when Min’s grandmother Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung) arrives from South Korea to oversee her grandson’s wedding.
It might take a while to explain everything that happens in the movie, even if we avoid spoiler territory. But all you may need to know is that it’s not the journey or destination that makes The Wedding Banquet a fun party, but the people that you’re traveling with. And damn, this cast is such a pleasure to watch. Tran and Yang take the hardest roles as being the doubtful Debbie Downers to their lovely counterparts. Gladstone and Han have fun as sweet-hearted cushions to their partners’ anxiety spikes, and it’s clear that gay is good and the couples are in love, but love can only go so far.
Youn’s performance is especially phenomenal, clearing the film’s presence as worthy enough of its own story. It’s heart-wrenching enough when characters are forced to hide their sexuality to appease others, but luckily this version quickly discards that discomfort when Ja-Young immediately pings the scam, aware of Min’s sexuality before he had the chance to come out. Instead of trying to wave it all away, Ja-Young helps with the scheme so that Min’s grandfather, chairman of the family company and presumed homophobe, can pass away knowing that Min is married. Ja-Young also quietly observes the couples’ melodramatic turmoil and withholds judgment, even when silly gets to breaking-point bonkers. What makes this powerful is that Ja-Young, composed of familial expectation and experiences, knows that Min’s happiness exists outside the path set for him. Thankfully absent of overly affected dialogue of disappointment or self-flagellation, Ja-Young internally challenges her expectations of what a normal family should be in order to keep the one that exists in the now. In one scene, she asks Min about Chris’s family, and you can see her heart break in real time when Min shares that they spend time together — a chance that she wasn’t able to do when Min left Korea in search of finding his identity in America.
The feeling of time lost is not only shared by Ja-Young, who seeks to affirm Min’s joy. Joan Chen, who plays Angela’s mother May (notably the same name as the main character in Lee’s original film), a parent who overcompensates in her role as an ally. May is seen as the proud PFLAG-badge carrying member of the community who wins awards for her LGBTQ+ support, but Angela still harbors a grudge for the years that it took for May to accept Angela’s sexuality. Both sides feel right and true to their hearts, but it can be especially difficult to find fault in someone who doesn’t know how else to apologize except to keep trying (and when that person is Joan Chen trying her best, it’s even harder to think the worst of her). The film makes sure to extend kindness to the older generation as well — and to gift us the power of Youn and Chen in a couple of scenes together.
The Wedding Banquet renews the beautiful confrontation and collision of different cultures, families, and unexpected roads to let each character cry and shine. As much as I was eager to see how it ends, I could have also watched them hang out in the club together, attend art exhibits, de-gay living spaces. The story may fall into a hyperspecific slice of first-generation Gaysian culture (to which if you belong: heck yeah!). If you don’t belong, then please know that everything that happens here will happen to every single gay couple that you meet, so it’s fair to ask them if they have partaken in a lavender marriage that ended up uprooting their ancestors’ dead hearts from the ground and seizing them again to death. And when they remake The Wedding Banquet again in 2055, we will contend with the new new-normal of happy families to ask the question again.
The Wedding Banquet
2025
dir. Andrew Ahn
103 mins
