If the 1993 Wedding ceremony Banquet introduced an impressively progressive (for its time) imaginative and prescient of queer household, the brand new iteration invitations us to dream greater.
Picture: Bleecker Avenue Media/Everett Assortment
Spoilers forward for the plot and ending of The Wedding ceremony Banquet.
“I do know it’s scary, however we now have to let ourselves hope just a little bit.” It’s mere minutes into The Wedding ceremony Banquet when Lee (Lily Gladstone) says this to her companion, Angela (Kelly Marie Tran). She’s referring to their IVF efforts, which have, up to now, not yielded outcomes. It’s solely been a pair weeks for the reason that final implantation, so it’s too quickly to say if Lee’s being pregnant will take, regardless of Angela’s chronically oversharing PFLAG mother Could (Joan Chen) asserting that she’s going to be a grandmother. However the thought of embracing hope extends effectively previous Lee’s IVF — it seems like a central tenet to The Wedding ceremony Banquet, an unapologetically queer movie launched within the midst of quickly escalating authorities repression. If the 1993 Wedding ceremony Banquet introduced an impressively progressive (for its time) imaginative and prescient of queer household, the brand new iteration invitations us to dream greater.
Each motion pictures comply with comparable plot beats, with some notably totally different particulars. In Ang Lee’s unique movie, Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) is hiding his long-term relationship with Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein) from his conservative mother and father in Taiwan. When Wai-Tung agrees to marry Wei-Wei (Could Chin) so she will get a inexperienced card and he can get his mother and father off his again, Mr. and Mrs. Gao (Lung Sihung and Gua Ah-leh) make a shock journey to New York to satisfy their future daughter-in-law. As soon as there, they insist on a marriage banquet to honor the nuptials, and Wai-Tung is pressured to keep up the ruse by transferring Wei-Wei in and disguising Simon as his roommate.
Andrew Ahn’s modern remake takes a distinct path to the identical title celebration. Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-chan) have been relationship for years, however Min’s visa is ready to run out and his grandmother, Ja-Younger (Youn Yuh-jung), needs him to return to Korea to take over the household enterprise. After Chris turns down Min’s hasty marriage proposal, Min and Angela determine to get hitched — Min will have the ability to keep within the U.S., and he’ll use his ample funds to assist pay for one more spherical of IVF for Angela and Lee, whose second try has simply failed. As quickly as Min informs his old school grandmother that he’s getting married, nevertheless, she flies to Seattle to satisfy Angela for herself.
It’s right here that The Wedding ceremony Banquet makes its first main diversion from its predecessor. One of many smartest selections in Ahn’s remake is the choice to drop the pretense for the wedding instantly. On Angela’s finish, there’s no have to misinform her mom, although Could should preserve the reality to herself. (“What am I presupposed to say at my PFLAG assembly tonight?” she calls for.) However Min makes an actual effort to idiot Ja-Younger, together with transferring into Angela and Lee’s house, and forcing them to clear it of any lesbian paraphernalia. It’s one thing of a shock, then, when his grandmother arrives and doesn’t purchase it. “I’m not an fool,” Ja-Younger tells Min. “You need me to imagine you’re sleeping with that girl?” This subversion of the story grounds the movie in actuality: As laborious because it may need been to maintain everybody at nighttime a few lavender marriage in 1993, doing so in 2025 feels subsequent to inconceivable.
There’s nonetheless a marriage banquet, naturally, nevertheless it’s not designed to idiot anybody however Min’s homophobic grandfather, who Ja-Younger says will solely imagine the wedding is legit if he sees it within the paper. These coming into The Wedding ceremony Banquet anticipating a farce could be dissatisfied by Min’s grandmother’s immediate consciousness, which shifts the story into new terrain. However it’s price noting that Ang Lee’s film can also be much less farcical than marketed, and simply as grounded in advanced relationships and actual human drama. In that movie, whereas the marriage banquet is a hit, Wai-Tung does reveal the reality about his identification to his mom, who takes it about as poorly as anticipated. Wai-Tung’s father, nevertheless, privately reveals to Simon that he is aware of the wedding is a sham, and that he considers Simon one other son. It’s a transferring second, difficult considerably by Mr. Gao swearing Simon to secrecy — and explaining that he went together with the lie as a result of it was the one approach he’d get a grandchild.
Sure, the 1993 Wedding ceremony Banquet has Wei-Wei getting pregnant by Wai-Tung on their marriage ceremony night time in a really unlucky scene that, no matter Ang Lee’s intention, reads as Wei-Wei sexually assaulting her husband. The brand new Wedding ceremony Banquet mercifully avoids these consent points by having a blacked-out Chris and Angela falling into mattress with one another, after which Angela will get pregnant. It’s not a very plausible plot improvement — “Wait, you had been the highest?” Min calls for of Chris after he finds out — however no less than each events concerned seemed to be equally fucked-up on the time. And the being pregnant is crucial to each variations of The Wedding ceremony Banquet, movies that grow to be much less about fooling conservative family and extra concerning the creation of a brand new sort of household. Within the unique film, that’s Wei-Wei deciding towards an abortion and opting to have the newborn, inviting Wai-Tung and Simon to be fathers to her youngster. Even when preparations like this had existed lengthy earlier than audiences noticed them onscreen, the household unit that emerges feels quietly radical for when the movie was launched.
However it’s 2025 now, and we’re not so simply impressed. The previous few a long time have invited a wider understanding of sexuality, gender, household, and relationship dynamics, so it’s becoming that Ahn’s Wedding ceremony Banquet concludes with a extra expansive imaginative and prescient than its predecessor’s. Marriage itself has, after all, modified, which permits for the sort of ending that wasn’t potential 32 years in the past: As Angela and Min put together to be legally wed on the courthouse, Chris interrupts the proceedings to suggest to his boyfriend. Ja-Younger, who has slowly come round to accepting Min’s sexuality and embracing Chris as a part of the household, watches as her grandson will get the marriage he needed all alongside. This Wedding ceremony Banquet concludes with a scene of Angela, Lee, Min, and Chris collectively elevating two kids, the child Angela had after a drunken fling with Chris and the one Lee had by way of the IVF that Min funded. Regardless of how chaotic that family appears, it’s a picture-perfect end.
As comfortable endings go, The Wedding ceremony Banquet’s feels virtually too good to be true, although the wailing infants helpfully puncture the fantasy a bit. It’s laborious to learn the ending as something however a deliberate escalation of the unique: This Wedding ceremony Banquet begins with a leg-up on the 1993 movie, giving us two homosexual {couples} as an alternative of 1, and it ends with extra addition — the place the primary film has one child and three mother and father, the remake has two infants and 4 mother and father. Decreasing the plot to fundamental math might sound foolish, nevertheless it’s an trustworthy reflection of the best way Ahn’s movie is constructing on what got here earlier than. Nevertheless progressive the ending of the 1993 film could also be, it nonetheless takes deception and settling to get there. Within the new film, there is no such thing as a vital compromise, with the wedding of comfort deserted completely. As an alternative, everybody will get what they need (no matter no matter inevitable problems comply with), and we shut on the creation of a queer household that’s extra balanced and inclusive than what Ang Lee and co-screenwriters Neil Peng and James Schamus had been capable of envision. (Notably, Schamus returned to co-write the screenplay for the remake.)
However the six-person household unit isn’t what makes The Wedding ceremony Banquet radical — it’s the hope at its core. The comfortable ending feels downright utopian at a time when queer households are below assault. The Trump administration has proven a dogged willpower to roll again civil rights, with the main focus up up to now totally on trans individuals. Identical-sex marriage and the flexibility of queer individuals to undertake are removed from protected. And that’s to say nothing of the crackdown on all types of immigration, one other key side of the Wedding ceremony Banquet story. None of that is new data to anybody paying even just a little little bit of consideration, and the filmmakers are actually conscious of the political actuality the film is being launched in (even when the scenario wasn’t fairly so dire throughout manufacturing). They’ve merely made a option to current one thing aspirational. If the ending feels unrealistically idealized for the instances we stay in, that’s by design: “Hope is a radical act” may sound like a cliche at this level, however that doesn’t make it any much less true.