The Wedding Banquet (1993)

Hsi yen (The Wedding Banquet) is an enjoyable movie to watch. It does not matter if you are acquainted with Ang Lee's work. The film is about a woman wants to stay in the country gets married to a gay man. The man tries to hide being gay when his parents visit from out of the country. All of the performances are excellent in this picture.

Fmovies: The Wedding Banquet was the first Ang Lee film that I watched. I remember I was about 10 or 11 years old when I watched it. At that time, I did not understand the movie at all. However, as I grow older, I watched it again and I realized what a masterpiece that Ang Lee had accomplished. Coming from the same background, as Taiwanese immigrant to the United States, I can certainly relate many of issues with the protagonist Wai-Tung. My parents are exactly like Wai-Tung's parents. They have high expectation of the son and carry on the family name is the most important thing. Ang Lee did a very good job on depicting the traditional father figure in Taiwanese society. My father, very much like Wai-Tung's, is a very serious person. To him everything has to be done straight and upright. My mother on the other hand is very sentimental. She would just cry like Wai-Tung's mother in the movie. Taiwanese mothers always care for their son so much that they literally do everything for their son, just like how Wai-Tung's mother sets up a blind date for him. My parents are so serious that sometimes if I joke about me liking a man they would get upset. Therefore, I really can understand how Wai-Tung has to hide his secret for such a long time in the movie.

I like how Ang Lee uses Wai-Tung to represent Taiwan; Wei-Wei to represent China, and Simon to represent the US. In the movie, there is one scene where Wei-Wei wears a red dress in the air port picking up Wai-Tung's parents, I just could not help myself but laugh at the expression that Wai-Tung's dad gives when he sees Wei-Wei. He must think her as another communist he fought in the Chinese civil war. Another fascinating thing about this movie is that I watched it again in my film study class and even the movie is in mandarin, my classmates seem to understand the messages and laugh about them. I guess it is the magic of the movie. It really can transcend time and languages. Overall, Wedding Banquet has became my all time favorite of all the Ang Lee films.

I suppose The Wedding Banquet could be considered a romantic comedy. It is so in the best senses of both words: romantic without being sappy, and comedic without being ridiculous. The characters are vibrant and interesting without being cliches. Ang Lee has not created a great movie, simply a perfect one.

The Wedding Banquet fmovies. Ang Lee with infinite wisdom seems to be saving the best part of this film for last. Acceptance is the underlying theme of this movie, which I recently watched for the second time. I saw the film when it was originally released in 1993. At that time, it seemed to have been breaking ground for tolerance from the straight world toward gays, in general.

Ang Lee is one of the best film directors working these days. This is a small film in comparison to what came afterward. The story of how parents in a conservative society view their children that are "different" is always an interesting idea. Those same parents produced that child; the mere idea they will turn their backs to a son who is living openly as a gay man is a complex problem, at best.

Different cultures react differently, as is the case in this film. While the parents are not completely taken over by the way they discover their son has turned out to be, they go along with the flow, never condemning the son, his partner, or the young woman who is pretending to be, what she is not.

The acting is good in general, but it has to be the actor who plays the father, who ultimately wins one's heart. His culture goes back for centuries and he is won by his son's lover because he sees how kind, decent and honest he really is.

It's better never to judge, or so it seems that Ang Lee is telling us.

The Wedding Banquet is a truly inspiring and cross-culturally challenging film. It touches on many issues/themes which have never been combined before in one movie: Taiwanese Americans vs. Chinese Americans, Asian American families, old school parents vs. younger generation(s), multi-racial couples, gay couples, gay Asian Americans, immigrants, pride, family values and love.

AndÂ… while I found the ending of this movie somewhat unrealistic (I'll let other viewers decide) I also found the film challenging and optimistic (which is where my realism takes over).

You should watch this movie if you areÂ… AsianÂ… gayÂ… Asian AND gayÂ… or simply want to learn something about another culture. You might be surprised!

Props to Ang Lee for creating a unique opportunity to look into two very distinct and different cultures at the same time: Asian American and gays in the early 90s.

The Wedding Banquet is marketed as a comedy, but it is more than that. Closer in plot and style to Green Card than The Birdcage it examines the personal consequences of deceit. The comedy is there of course, but so is much tenderness and pain as a marriage of convenience between a gay man and a woman deportee unravels. Like Green Card which had similar plotlines, the "obvious" resolutions do not appear so likely as the film progresses which adds to its attractiveness.

I recommend it highly.