Wedding banquet review: the family you find

Although it is as modern as possible, there is a touch of something Shakespearean in “The wedding banquet”. The intrigue, on paper, is just a direct stuffing: trying to solve a complicated set of problems, a lesbian agrees to marry the boyfriend of her best friend – but then her grandmother comes in town, with the intention of launching a huge traditional celebration.

This premise is a touch of the 21st century on the classic queer in 1993 of Ang Lee, written by James Schamus. In this film, a Taiwanese American marries his female tenant, rather than his own male partner, both to hide his real relationship from his parents and help him get a green card. This version, led by Andrew Ahn and written by Ahn and Schamus, becomes more naughty, mainly because homosexual marriage is now legal in the United States, so that the characters are confronted with a different series from snags. The two films explore how someone from a traditional Asian family sails on queer identity, highlighting comedy and discovery and discovery that result when cultures collide. But in this new “wedding banquet”, the objective also moves.

In this story, Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) are deeply in love, living in the house of Seattle whose Lee inherited her mother. Angela’s mother (Joan Chen) is an exuberant ally of the Queer community in Seattle, in such a performative way that it seems that she could catch up with something. The pair feels the tension while Lee tries to design through a second costly in vitro fertilization. When it doesn’t work, they start to lose hope: they just don’t have the money for a third round, and Lee begins to wonder if his age has something to do with that.

Their life is closely linked to those of Angela’s best friend, Chris (Bowen Yang), and her boyfriend, Min (Han Gi-Chan), who live in a guest house in the courtyard of Lee and Angela. Min also happens to be the heir rich in a large company that his grandmother (Yuh-Jung Youn) expects him to direct. He doesn’t want to do this. He could escape it if he had a way to renew his visa, and therefore he offers Chris. But Chris is afraid of commitment, and therefore Min, desperate to avoid his fate, deck a plan.