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The Wedding Banquet, Ang Lee’s first film to be released theatrically in the United States, may have been a victim of bad timing. Had it held off its US-wide release in August 1993 by a month or so, it might have been able to bounce off the surprise success of The Joy Luck Club and gain a lasting foothold in the public consciousness. Instead, it isn’t even a particularly well-remembered example of the new queer cinema movement it’s been retroactively grouped into.
The film follows Gao Wai-Tung (Winston Chao), a Taiwanese expat living in Manhattan with his partner, Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein). Gu Wei-Wei (May Chin), a tenant in one of the buildings Wai-Tung owns as part of his property business, mentions that she’s anxious about getting caught by Immigration. She hasn’t been able to find a suitable prospect on the dating scene who she might marry in order to secure a green card. Upon hearing this, Simon spies an opportunity. Wai-Tung’s parents (Gua Ah-leh and Lung Sihung) have been needling him with increasing urgency to marry a nice Chinese girl so he can finally give them a grandchild, particularly after his father’s recent stroke. If Wai-Tung and Wei-Wei get married, Simon suggests, Wei-Wei will be able to stay in the US and Wai-Tung will be able to get his parents off his back.
News of the engagement leads to the Gaos making a surprise visit to meet their new daughter-in-law. Wai-Tung wants nothing more than to get the perfunctory courthouse wedding over and done with, but a chance meeting in a restaurant with Mr Gao’s former driver sees Wai-Tung and Wei-Wei being strongarmed into participating in an elaborate wedding banquet so that Mr Gao will not lose face.
The banquet is a lavish and engaging set piece which showcases a range of Chinese wedding customs, albeit with a bit of gentle ribbing at how some of them might come across to outsiders. One of a handful of white guests at the wedding expresses bafflement at the free-flowing booze and general rowdiness, admitting that he thought that “the Chinese were meek, quiet math whizzes.” This prompts Lee, in an uncredited cameo as another wedding guest, to remark that they’re “witnessing the results of 5,000 years of sexual repression.”
The night ends with Wai-Tung and Wei-Wei alone in their honeymoon suite. It’s at this point that the film veers off in a direction from which it never really recovers. Wei-Wei forces herself on Wai-Tung, claiming that she’s “liberating” him when Wai-Tung, too drunk to up any physical resistance, tells her no.
The movie does not treat this as rape. You’d expect a product-of-the-times writing fumble like this to show up in a dated sex comedy like 40 Days and 40 Nights. But rather than being one poorly-considered comedic set piece that can be written off once the scene finishes, The Wedding Banquet forces its audience’s minds to linger on the cascading consequences of this misjudged story beat right up to the final frame.
Wei-Wei soon announces that she’s pregnant, and from here on out, the movie tries to have its cake and eat it. It wants to pull off a mid-movie genre shift from comedy of manners to family melodrama, but it doesn’t want to deal with the ramifications of the method it’s chosen to get that all-important grandchild into the mix. Mr and Mrs Gao stay on after the wedding due to a spike in Mr Gao’s blood pressure making it unsafe for him to fly back to Taiwan. Wei-Wei grows closer to Mrs Gao, forming a bond that she’s never shared with her own mother. Wai-Tung and Simon’s relationship is stretched to breaking point while they fight to maintain the marriage ruse with everyone piled into the same Greenwich Village townhouse.
Mr Gao later reveals to Simon that he speaks English and knows that Wai-Tung is gay. He even gives Simon a hong bao, a red envelope filled with cash traditionally given at weddings, to demonstrate that he recognises Simon’s place in Wai-Tung’s life. But just when you think he’s going to draw this farce to a close, he swears Simon to secrecy. Mr Gao doesn’t want to do anything that might jeopardise the continuation of the family line, even if it means trapping Wai-Tung with Wei-Wei in a life that is fundamentally wrong for him.
The film is a hair’s breadth away from being an extremely dark satire on its own premise. Romantic comedies exist to poke fun at the absurdities of dating and marriage. But when it comes to the crunch, they ultimately validate the status quo rather than challenge it. A film that leaves Wai-Tung married to the woman who raped him and Simon being practically railroaded out of his own life would be a grim but effective demonstration of the overwhelmingly coercive nature of heteronormativity. Except the film frames Wei-Wei’s last-minute decision not to go through with terminating the pregnancy as she and Wai-Tung had initially discussed as a happy ending. Was this the “liberation” that Wei-Wei had in mind?
Fire Island director Andrew Ahn is currently working on a remake of the film starring Bowen Yang, Kelly Marie Tran and Lily Gladstone, with a predicted 2025 release date. It remains to be seen if Ahn’s aim is to rehabilitate the movie into a more light-hearted comedy or to grapple with its source material’s darker elements.
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