The Wedding Banquet
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"We gotta de-queer the house!"
Overview
A stacked cast (including Lily Gladstone and Bowen Yang) brings this re-imagining of Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet to effervescent life with humour and heart. Chris (Yang) and his longtime boyfriend Min (Han Gi-chan) are living in the Seattle garage of Chris' best friend Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and her girlfriend Lee (Gladstone), supporting each other through visa struggles and unsuccessful attempts at having children. Lee and Min hatch a plan for everyone to get what they need: Min will marry Angela, allowing him to stay in the US and appease his family, in return covering the cost of Lee's continued IVF treatment. What should be a relatively simple bit of paperwork quickly spirals out of control when Min's grandmother Ja-Young (Oscar winner and screen legend Youn Yuh-jung) arrives intent on the happy hetero couple having a traditional Korean wedding ceremony, forcing the little chosen family into an escalating ruse that tests the bonds of their relationships.
“The combination of cast and storytelling makes for an emotionally gorgeous, hilarious, and touching film that you’ll want to rewatch over and over again”
“So charming, and then so unexpectedly moving”
“A worthy successor to Ang Lee’s classic, and a chance for a group of actors to shine together and separately”
Why See This Film
The Wedding Banquet is a loving exploration of gender roles and generational conflict that balances high farce with a surprising depth: for all the fizzy quipping and madcap misunderstandings, there are places of emotional weight that allow the cast (in particular Gladstone and Youn Yuh-jung) moments to express powerful feelings beyond words. This is queer cinema that acknowledges the conflicts and compromises of trying to survive authentically against the challenges of rising rents and increasingly restrictive government, and the role that community plays in helping each other thrive.
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