The Story:
The Wedding Banquet is a romantic comedy with one of the oddest premises I’ve seen in a while. Gao Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) is a gay Taiwanese man living in New York City with his lover, Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein). Since Wai-Tung hasn’t come out to his parents, they try to get him married by paying for a dating service.
Wai Tung owns a beat-up apartment building in the city. One of his tenants, Wei-Wei (Kao Chin Su-mei), an artist who can’t hold down a job, is behind on her rent and tries to use one of her paintings as payment. She tells Wai-Tung that he’s lucky to be rich and have his citizenship and explains that she needs a green card so she doesn’t get deported to mainland China. When Simon sees the painting and hears that Wei-Wei needs to find a way to stay in the country, Simon convinces Wai-Tung to marry her. After all, it would make his parents happy and give Wei-Wei what she wants.
As you can imagine, Wai-Tung tells his parents that he has a girlfriend, and they immediately make plans to go to the United States and stay with their son to meet her. Since they’ll be staying with Wai-Tung, he and Simon have to de-gay the apartment and tell Wai-Tung’s parents that he’s renting a room from Simon. The parents take well to Wei-Wei, especially Wai-Tung’s mother. When they find out that Wai-Tung and Wei-Wei plan to get married at the justice of the peace, they’re not happy but go along just to be there.
Simon takes everybody out for dinner, and it ends up that the restaurant owner knows Wai-Tung’s father and decides to throw the newlyweds a wedding banquet. Although Wai-Tung and Wei-Wei aren’t pleased with the prospect of a formal wedding, they have no choice but go along with the plan. The wedding and banquet turns out to be one heck of a party, and their marriage of convenience gets even more complicated.
I’m not going to get into the rest of the movie, just know that the shenanigans don’t stop with the wedding. We get to understand more about the relationship between Wai-Tung’s mother and Wei-Wei, and at times it feels as if the movie should have been about them. The two women often seem closer than Simon and Wai-Tung, which is a bit odd for a gay romance. And although The Wedding Banquet centers around a fake marriage, it’s more about living in the closet than marriage equality.
Final thoughts:
The Wedding Banquet is an early film from director Ang Lee, who does a decent job keeping the story going and holding your attention. It’s billed as a romantic comedy, but I found it lacking in both. While Wai-Tung and Simon are a couple, they seem a bit cold and detached from one another. Wai-Tung never seems too concerned as to how his marriage to Wei-Wei is was affecting Simon, and vice-versa. There are better gay films out there.