“Fire Island” director Andrew Ahn releases his first foray into writing-directing with “The Wedding Banquet,” which premiered at Sundance earlier this year. The film is co-written with James Schamus, who also worked on Ang Lee‘s original 1993 romantic comedy of the same name. While Lee’s remake featured a green card marriage between a wealthy gay man and his tenant to maintain his New York lifestyle and heteronormative image to his Taiwanese parents, Ahn’s “The Wedding Banquet,” this time, takes place on the opposite coast, and adds a Korean American twist.
“The Wedding Banquet” opens in Seattle and immediately pulls out all the stops. Second-generation Chinese American, Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) is happily partnered to Lee (Lily Gladstone), a vocal LGBTQ+-activist. She is only surrounded by friends and family who love her, and seem to have her best interests at heart. Her best friend, queer studies Ph.D. student, Chris (Bowen Yang), is also in a long-term relationship with the naive but soft-spoken Korean corporate heir, Min (Han Gi-chan), and lives in the shed of their house. Angela’s mother (Joan Chen) is likewise incredibly supportive – sometimes, in a mildly tokenizing way – of her daughter’s queer identity.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, however, especially in the face of looming disaster. Min realizes he needs to get married to stay in the United States, but he has not yet come out to his grandparents. Lee desires another round of costly IVF treatments to make a baby, but their funds are running dry. The stress only increases after one night of bad decisions, when Chris and Angela take their frustrations out on each other – and Angela ends up pregnant. As one complication piles on top of another, the group of friends conclude that the only viable solution moving forward is to marry Min and Angela off together: which seems simple enough, until Min’s grandmother (Yoon Yuh-jung), arrives to meet the bride.
In this fiasco of a lavender marriage between a lesbian and gay couple, “The Wedding Banquet” reveals a genuinely funny, and still somehow legible exposition of a complicated mess of bad decisions. In a roundtable with the main cast – Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, and Han Gi-chan – the four commented on finding a chosen family. “It’s an act of decolonial love,” Lily Gladstone said. Bowen Yang agreed. “This chosen family lives together, and eventually becomes a chosen biological family after years of being alienated by [their own biological caretakers],” he said.
The energy had apparently been likewise supportive on-set. In an earlier Vanity Fair interview – conducted the same day “The Wedding Banquet” cast and crew shot the Korean wedding scene – Kelly Marie Tran accidentally came out of the closet. She reflected upon this in the roundtable as well. Sometimes, acting and personal experience “melds together,” she said, and “the lines [between the two] are watery.” But for her, the moment was more of a testament to the supportive nature of the people involved in the production. “It says a lot more about the community that we had making this film,” she said. “I’m so grateful I had the community around me that I did, and the film celebrates that.”
Han Gi-chan agreed. His parents exposed him to an English-language education at a nearly age, but this was indeed his first foray into big-budget US film. “Being in a Hollywood film for the first time, it feels like a total dream and adventure,” he said, starry-eyed. “I think I’m still dreaming.”
Indeed, a standout of “The Wedding Banquet” is the ways in which it explores discussions of queerness are framed within the United States. This is similarly mirrored in Ang Lee’s movie; both Lee’s protagonist and Ahn’s Angela feel skeptical about putting their lives out in the open. While Angela’s mother, for example, loudly uplifts her daughter at flashy diversity events – sometimes, it seems, to elevate her own neighborhood profile – Angela’s more wall-flower personality shrinks from the theatrics. This only intensifies with the second half of the film, where she is consistently on-edge with the traditional pomp and circumstance with the traditional Korean wedding that Min’s grandmother insists on throwing.
“I absolutely took from my experience being a daughter and having a complicated relationship with my mother, and it was very strangely therapeutic to have these emotional healing moments,” Kelly Marie Tran said. “My sisters came to see this movie yesterday, and they were like, ‘Wow, you really dealt with some stuff… I think both [Joan and me] were able to have the privilege of using our own experience and pain in that relationship.”
The tumultuous state of the actively anti-DEI and anti-immigrant contemporary moment in the United States was also not lost upon the actors. “We didn’t make a political film,” Lily Gladstone asserted. “We made a film that has a really solid bedrock with socio-economical-cultural comments, without explicitly being about queerness, culture, gentrification. That’s just the world that this family finds themselves in. And I think that makes the film represent people authentically, [meeting them] where they’re at.”
Bowen Yang jumped off of Gladstone’s comment, gesturing to Ang Lee’s original. “They say hyper-specificity ends up being universal – and this kind of hyper-specificity ends up being relevant and timeless. It’s never not going to be important to touch on these things, just like how the original movie was relevant at the time and still is.”
Overall, “The Wedding Banquet” is a surprisingly refreshing take on the Ang Lee original. In the same spirit as the original, the characters are informed by their queer, immigrant, and minority identities, but they are not flattened by them. Instead, Andrew Ahn deftly illustrates a portrait of the sheer complexity and chaos of what it means to be human – and in love – in the contemporary day and age. Though the film ends on a saccharine, borderline cheesy note, this laugh-out-loud romantic comedy is sure to entertain millennial audiences, and feel like a refreshing break (or parody) of the interesting times we currently live in.
