Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet screened at this year’s BFI Flare and is awaiting a UK-wide release date.
You should know from the start that Andrew Ahn’s Wedding Banquet is a remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 film in name only. And it’s all the better for it. While Lee’s original film was something of a misfire attempt at an intergenerational culture clash drama, Ahn completely overhauls the characters, setting and premise to deliver another fresh but heartfelt romantic comedy after the success of Fire Island.
Faced with the prospect of being unable to afford a final round of IVF, Lee and Angela (Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran) strike a deal with their friends, Min and Chris (Han Gi-Chan and Bowen Yang). If Angela marries Min to help him get a green card so that he can’t be forced to move back to Korea by his grandmother, Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung), he’ll give Lee and Angela the money they need for IVF. When Min tells Ja-Young the good news about his engagement, she immediately flies to Seattle to ascertain if the marriage is genuine and insists that the two of them must have a traditional Korean wedding ceremony.
Ahn teamed up with James Schamus, one of the writers of the original film, and together they have made some smart updates to the 1993 version. Romantic comedies often have a rather romantic approach to the economy, with protagonists living much more affluent lifestyles than their jobs might suggest. Here, the main characters’ economic situation helps to drive the conflict on multiple fronts. Lee and Angela’s finances are already stretched to the limit by their fertility treatments, but Lee understandably doesn’t want to risk losing their home, where Min and Chris also live as tenants in their back-garden guest house. This isn’t just for the obvious practical reasons but also because her late father saw owning a home as a way for indigenous families like theirs to strike back against the historic mistreatment of Native Americans by the US government.
At the other end of the spectrum, while Min initially appears to be earning a modest living as an artist, he’s actually the heir to a massive corporate fortune back in Seoul. Ja-Young’s initial motive for coming to Seattle is to determine if Angela is just marrying her grandson for his wealth. Even if you find the idea of Min having access to immense generational wealth a little too convenient, to begin with, the fact that the film doesn’t shy away from how financial insecurity influences the characters helps to ground the story.
Rather than leaning too heavily into the farcical tone favoured in the first half of the original movie, this re-working of The Wedding Banquet draws its comedy from the characters’ insecurities, but not so much that it drags down the mood for too long. In particular, Han Gi-Chan’s stand-out performance as Min, with a kind of Bertie Wooster happy-go-lucky effervescence, serves as a useful leavener for the more neurotic Angela and Chris as they work their way through their emotional obstacles. But the movie’s willingness to give its characters that depth is why it leaves the audience with the warm, loving glow that you feel at the end of a wedding that precedes a long and happy marriage.
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