A Taiwanese-American man is happily settled in New York with his American boyfriend. He plans a marriage of convenience to a Chinese woman in order to keep his parents off his back and to get the woman a green card. Chaos follows when his parents arrive in New York for the wedding.
Xi yan, Bröllopsfesten, O Banquete de Casamento, 囍宴, 결혼 피로연
65
Takes a standard premise and livens it up with charming specificity and a delicate tone. A really sturdy early Ang Lee work.
i love a movie with a fanfiction ass plot!! AH!!! fake dating! family drama!! men who love men!!! this was so funny and sweet and touching!!!! more queer movies like this please
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Film #29 of the "Scavenger Hunt" Challenge!
Task #24 : An LGBT genre film!
letterboxd.com/naughty/list/scavenger-hunt/
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Two gay men in a loving relationship and living together have to deal with the Taiwanese parents of Wai-Tung! The parents haven't even the slightest clue that their son is gay become annoyingly insistent and overbearing when it comes to finding him a bride!
Like a slice of life the film showcases both the lighter and darker side of any given moment in life! The comedy is not over the top, and is often generally quite fun and even moving! While it does take a serious turn that could have very well deflated all the goodwill it had worked so hard to earn! Thankfully director Ang Lee had mad skills and more importantly great finesse!
A thoroughly enjoyable affair! A character driven film that put only the best behind the steering wheel guaranteeing a most delightful movie going experience!
The Wedding Banquet includes some sumptuous sequences, along with some delightful Chinese cultural components, courtesy of its co-writer and director Ang Lee. Ang Lee founded the first half of the movie on the factual anecdote of a friend, Neil Peng (who also receives a co-writer credit). It's a movie which accentuates more heart than it does bite and includes some luscious cinematography which illustrates cartoon funniness in all its limitless sociable sentimentalism and intricate stupidity. It's Ang’s second feature after his 1991 debut Pushing Hands, and assisted in establishing him as a marketable filmmaker.
The Wedding Banquet is funny and sweet. It deals with a gay man pretending to marry a woman to appease his parents, and yet the film is delightful in spite of the implied homophobia of some of the characters. The parents spend so much time and money trying to get their son married and tradition matters so much to them. You start to feel bad that they are being lied to. But the beauty of The Wedding Banquet is that it plays with conflicting, contradictory emotions. The son's situation is where the real suffering is, but that doesn't mean we can't have sympathy for ignorant people believing a lie.
The film has an odd kind of comedy. It is a…
this is a minor miracle because it’s an LGBT movie with a happy ending and not one gay dies 🏳️🌈
Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet is a beautifully heartfelt drama, that is also very funny. It is, like Pushing Hands, a film about cultural differences and whether they are reconcilable. The Wedding Banquet is a warmer film than Pushing Hands, with the suggestion that almost anything can be overcome by leaving things unsaid, as well saying them. The Wedding Banquet has some wonderfully staged big events, the banquet itself, the subsequent party, where Ang Lee marshals a big cast with aplomb. However, it is the delicate, understated moments that make The Wedding Banquet sing; there is a late scene in the film, focused on two characters, who are facing away from the camera, and there is one line, which I…
Is it possible that Lubitsch bequeathed his 'touch' to Ang Lee? This is a wonderful, breezy romantic comedy about two very thorny issues - immigration and homophobia - that comes off as utterly unaffected, unpatronising and unencumbered with either timidity or tastelessness. It's not an issue movie, but it doesn't use its identity as a comedy to duck politics or tricky moments. There's an ACT-UP sign prominently featured in one scene, and the ending strikes a realistically bittersweet note. The acting isn't as sure-footed as it would be in his later films, where he could pick and choose from some of the world's greatest performers, but overall it's a charming reminder of the genre-hopping humanist that's currently being buried under eight trillion 3D frames per second and other pointless technological gimmicks.
Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet starts off as a cheerful, relatively escapist, rom-com in which a gay man (with a boyfriend) must stage a wedding in order to hide his sexuality from his parents. However, nearing the last hour, cold hard reality seeps in, and the comedic portions surprisingly thin down. Tensions become high and each character questions what they've been doing in their life... it gets really complicated.
But The Wedding Banquet remains an optimistic ode to the freedom of life, while also exploring the real meaning of family and marriage, and examining cultural and generational divide. For being a "silly comedy" it has some super mature themes and topics, which left me all the more impressed.
I like…
☆"Fate will find you, no matter how far apart you are."☆
The second film I'll watch as a concerted effort to celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Ang Lee's romantic comedy The Wedding Banquet is a progressive film years and years ahead of its time. Oscar and Golden Globe nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, this clever and forward-thinking movie from 1993 was made still in the relative early years of Lee’s career, but now helps serve as a precursor to many of the brilliant pictures he made since.
Considering the budget of just under $1 million and its $23.6 million worldwide gross, I would also call it quite the financial success too. What the hell was Hollywood…
I doubt anyone will agree with me on this, but Ang Lee’s only romantic comedy is also his saddest film. Tragedy makes pain and loss palpable, and once that pain and that loss are tangible, they can be processed. There’s catharsis; those emotions can be released through tears. But when they’re disguised as comedy, then they remain unprocessed, forever growing like weeds around your heart.
The shackles of heteronormativity are endless, painful, and often remain unsaid, unspoken—a secret trauma carried inside for as long as we live.
No one in this film—especially the men, who are bound to the repression expected of them by tradition—can express their true emotions. They have to deal with their truth alone—their trauma (Wai-Tung, who…
Ang Lee nos deja ver a sus personajes con compasión y eso es de las cosas que más me gustan de él. Con toques divertidos, otros devastadores, pero siempre haciendo una mezcla justa. Amé el toque doña herlinezco que tiene.
Romantic but well-crafted. I have no more words to describe this film. Looking forward to revisit it.
Genius humor throughout comedy and tragedy while discussing many important social issues such as homosexual marriage, illegal Chinese immigrants in the US, conservative Chinese family values, and female independence. Only An Lee as a director can make such a masterpiece :)
classic 90s romp of a film; it will make you laugh, it will make you cry, it will make you gay.
With regard to Asian romantic leads, no offense to Henry Goulding, but Winston Chao's astonishingly beautiful face could eat Henry for breakfast.
That nude portrait on the bookshelf of Winston Chao with an army hat over his crotch... yes I s***********d
love that, in the scene where they hide a bunch of wai-tung's stuff before his parents come so they won't realise he's gay, one of the giveaways is that he owns a VHS copy of todd haynes' poison
The weird sex scene aside (for which I don't think the movie needs at all, and isn't really dealt with in any real way), this is just such a pitch perfect dramedy. The set up has so many ways you could ruin with cliche characters, or ham-fisted strains for comedy, but Ang shirks that at every single turn. Would make a beautiful double feature with The Farewell, another "premise-y" movie that's treated with touching sensitivity.
LOVED IT.
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