Seoul on ice: A marriage of inconvenience in ‘The Wedding Banquet’

Bowen Yang and Han Gi-Chan in 'The Wedding Banquet.' | Luka Cyprian/Bleecker Street

I went to a screening of Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet with some trepidation. I’m suspicious of foreign films being given the Hollywood treatment, remade with English-speaking actors whom presumably subtitle-phobic Yankee Doodle Dandy ticket buyers are likely to be more familiar with. I remembered that a third of a century ago, with its thoughtful depiction of gay themes, the Manhattan-set Taiwanese The Wedding Banquet, in Mandarin and English, had been an arthouse hit, and I was nervous about what the box office-hungry La-La-Land dream factory would do to Ang Lee’s 1993 original.

There has also been a Tinseltown trend to compensate for decades of culturally insensitive Charlie Chan-ish, yellowface movies. As a film historian/critic who studies celluloid stereotypes, I applaud honest efforts to shatter racist tropes, as in Lulu Wang’s wonderful 2019 The Farewell. But heavily ballyhooed pictures such as John Chu’s 2018 Crazy Rich Asians (which was as wildly overblown as Chu’s 2024 Wicked) and 2023’s egregiously unfunny Joy Ride have fallen far short of the mark.

So, this reviewer is pleased to say that Ahn’s version of The Wedding Banquet didn’t disappoint. Where Joy Ride is full of slapstick, The Wedding Banquet 2.0 is sly, subtle, and supple. (There is only one major sight gag scene, when characters must quickly “de-gay” their home of possessions, décor, etc., that suggest homosexuality.) Although 2025’s Banquet is a comedy of errors with age-old mistaken identity twists, the film has something few contemporary romcoms have—nuance. In fact, it shows the complexity and multi-dimensionality of human beings more fully than most comedies have since the first cinematic pie was tossed into a face.

(Of course, it was a great Chinese philosopher, Chairman Mao, who wrote in 1937’s On Contradiction: “The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics.”

Banquet’s plot centers around two same-sex couples. As the student visa of USA-loving Min (Han Gi-chan) nears its expiration date, the artsy Korean proposes to his Asian-American live-in lover Chris (SNL’s Bowen Yang), who is a U.S. citizen—but commitment-phobic. They rent a converted garage from a lesbian couple in the adjacent house, Angela (Vietnamese-American Kelly Marie Tran) and homeowner Lee (Lily Gladstone, who received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nom for Martin Scorsese’s 2023 Killers of the Flower Moon), who is seeking to become pregnant via IVF. Gladstone plays Banquet’s only principal character—and the film’s sole lead—not of Asian ancestry.

(According to press notes, the Montana-born Gladstone, who grew up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, “conceived of Lee’s background as an urban Indigenous person living on her original land base, and since the film takes place in Seattle, Lee would be Duwamish. ‘Her father bought a house on Duwamish land,’ Gladstone shares, ‘and since his passing, Lee feels like it’s her responsibility to keep that land in her hands, and also to continue on this legacy and have a family of her own.’”)

The two couples, who are longtime friends, concoct a cockamamie scheme that will enable Min to remain in America and Angela and Lee to pursue the expensive IVF treatment through a marriage of convenience. But Ja-Young (movingly portrayed by South Korean Youn Yuh-jung, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for 2020’s Minari, one of the better of the recent spate of Asian American films), who is the matriarch of the family fortune and business, smells a rat and doesn’t buy that her grandson Min’s out-of-the-blue upcoming marriage is for real. With her suspicions, she flies from Seoul to Seattle to check out the impending nuptials.

The grandmother had stated her fear that Min’s wife-to-be was just a gold digger, but in what is arguably Banquet’s best performance, Ja-Young shows her true colors, depth, and deep love for her grandson. In lesser hands, the 70-something elder might have been the butt of jokes; Ahn co-wrote the screenplay with James Schamus, the original co-writer credit of the 1993 version, and Youn Yuh-jung is one of Korea’s finest thespians. With the role in such good hands, Ja-Young, who could have been depicted as a mean, petty, vindictive figure of ridicule, is likely the wisest and most compassionate of all of Banquet’s dramatis personae.

Shanghai-born Joan Chen (Bertolucci’s 1987 The Last Emperor and many others) joins the cast as Angela’s diva mom, May Chen. I believe that she and her daughter Angela are intended to be Chinese-American, but I don’t recall the film clarifying the nationality of all of the characters—which may have been deliberate, adding to the film’s sense of ambiguity over sex, gender, ethnicity, citizenship status, parenthood, etc.

The multi-talented Bowen Yang proves he can play drama, as well as SNL skits and musicals such as Wicked. Angela and Lee come across as very believable because the plain-looking Tran definitely doesn’t play some sort of “Dragon Lady” Asian sexpot stereotype. Gladstone’s character is quite overweight, and I mention this only because Angela and Lee seem like a realistic couple. Sometimes it seems to me (a heterosexual male reviewer) that Hollywood glams up lesbian characters and accentuates their “femininity,” I suspect to make straight audiences more receptive to them, the Showtime series The L Word being a case in point.  

The pro-gay, pro-immigrant, pro-ethnic minority The Wedding Banquet is quite timely, coming as LGBTQ people are under attack, foreign exchange students are swept off the streets by masked agents, immigrants are deported willy-nilly to hellhole penal colonies, and not long after a wave of anti-Asian hate has swept America with the mentally ill Trump—not content with his racist “Kung flu” cracks—now starting a trade war with Beijing. The demented Donald also managed to turn in vitro fertilization—one of Banquet’s subplots—into a campaign issue.

With its complexity and sophistication, it could be argued that The Wedding Banquet is a 2025 counterpart to the famed “Lubitsch Touch.” Although without divulging plot spoilers, it does have an extremely old-fashioned, traditionalist denouement. Nevertheless, this Banquet is an enjoyable, well-meaning filmic feast, an ode to true love and to being true to thine own self.

The Wedding Banquet theatrically opened on April 18. The film is mostly in English, with some Korean language and English subtitles. The trailer can be viewed here.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Ed Rampell

Ed Rampell is an LA-based film historian and critic, author of Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States, and co-author of The Hawaii Movie and Television Book. He has written for Variety, Television Quarterly, Cineaste, New Times L.A., and other publications. Rampell lived in Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii, and Micronesia, reporting on the nuclear-free and independent Pacific and Hawaiian Sovereignty movements. Ed Rampell’s novel The Disinherited: Blood Blalahs, about the Native Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement for Indigenous Rights, will be published by International Publishers in 2025. For information and to pre-order, go here.