REEL | A Queer Romantic Comedy of Errors – 'The Wedding Banquet'

"Queer theory takes the joy out of being gay!"

Bleecker Street / VVS Films

Thirty years later, Korean-American indie filmmaker Andrew Ahn remakes Ang Lee's seminal 1993 Taiwanese queer romantic comedy, The Wedding Banquet, into a fresh take on modern romance featuring a delightful cast of Asian actors. Shot in Vancouver but set in Seattle (because of course), the film centres on two LGBTQ couples comically trying to solve each another's familial, financial, and romantic problems in the silliest ways possible.

Starring Bowen Yang and Han Gi-chan alongside Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran as two separate pairs of gay and lesbian couples, friends, and housemates, Gi-Chan's Min proposes that Tran's Angela marry him as his "beard" in order to secure his expiring immigration status and please his traditional Korean grandparents, while promising to fund another expensive IVF procedure for Gladstone's Lee to conceive a baby in exchange as Yang's Chris is not yet ready to marry Min yet. It only gets messier and more complicated from there, thanks to each character's personal baggage preventing them from making certain life commitments.

Filling out the winning cast, Joan Chen as Tran's difficult mother and Youn Yuh-jung as Gi-Chan's matriarchal grandmother are endearing in contrast to their openly out and progressive offspring. Written by Ahn and original screenwriter James Schamus (also a producer), the script needs to race through its situations to set up the comedy, absurd situations, and plenty of thoughtful character moments that evolve the brokenness of supposed traditional Asian values that seem to divide more than they unite families.

Ahn's updated, more explicitly queer version of The Wedding Banquet is a joyous farce. It celebrates all the fun and ridiculousness of the rom-com genre with enough gay, lesbian, and Asian twists to make the humour about chosen families feel more original and contemporary despite the usual contrivances and manufactured obstacles movie characters seem to always face in romantic relationships.

Disclosure: My adorable baby "nephew" Cypress Chan van Rijswijk makes his brief on-screen acting debut at the end of the film!


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