The Wedding Banquet: a satisfying reimagining of the 1993 classic

Years before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Lust, Caution (2007), Ang Lee’s first big hit was The Wedding Banquet (1993), a bittersweet romantic comedy about a bisexual Taiwanese guy living with his boyfriend in Manhattan who agrees to marry a woman to appease his traditional parents, who are unaware of his sexuality. To his horror, the parents fly to New York expecting a grandiose wedding, and the action becomes increasingly manic. It was a box-office hit – pro rata, the most profitable film of the year – and won the Golden Bear at Berlin, as well as receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Its story about people with very different attitudes to family and sexuality chimed with the mixed messaging of the Clinton administration, which spoke out against homophobic discrimination even as it passed the Defence of Marriage Act, banning recognition of same-sex marriage. It has now been remade by Andrew Ahn, director of middling gay comedy Fire Island (2022), which was also taken from a beloved original – Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Fortunately, this update captures the essence of the original while giving the story a fresh, charming 2020s spin.

James Schamus, who co-wrote the original, also wrote the screenplay with Ahn, and the result is a delightful farce that shows the different attitudes to queer lives across generations while playing to its cast’s considerable comic strengths. Here, the plot revolves around two same-sex couples – two women and two men – who are close friends. The women, Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone), are desperate to have a child through IVF. The men, Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-chan), need a green card for Min to stay in the country, but Chris is not ready to commit. Min agrees to pay for the women’s IVF if Angela marries him. But their plans are upended when Min’s stern grandmother, Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung, best known to western audiences for her Oscar-winning performance in 2020’s Minari), flies over from South Korea, expecting a huge celebration.

The plot is contrived and often silly – a development in the last third lacks credibility – but the film’s light touch and strong performances, particularly from the actresses, are winning. Gladstone has the dullest role, as the long-suffering partner to a neurotic scientist, but adds a needed warmth and maturity. Tran is a revelation, showing a spiky comic talent a world away from her role as Rose Tico in recent Star Wars films. But it is Joan Chen, as Angela’s embarrassingly over-supportive mother, and the believably intimidating Youn who make the greatest impression.

This is a reimagining rather than a remake of Lee’s original. While both films foreground the characters’ intergenerational differences, Ahn places more emphasis on the clashes between younger Asian and Asian American people free to be themselves and older characters with more traditional values (unlike the original, the remake has no significant white characters). The 2025 film is also significantly queerer. The LGBTQ+ characters sometimes behave badly, even appallingly, to each other, but the strength of their alternative family units may withstand these storms. Although Trumpism and the surge of the right in the US are not referenced directly, the idyll these queer people of colour aspire to create is a punch back against those who seek to repress them. In a country where protections for trans people are being removed and DEI programmes discontinued, a movie about queer people creating a new family model is not just bold but necessary. Tellingly, we learn that Min’s grandfather is resolutely homophobic. But we never hear or see him in the film; irredeemable bigots have no place at the Wedding Banquet table.

As funny as the film is, knowingly sending up romcom clichés even as it embraces them, it is the beautifully played sombre moments that hit hardest. A confrontation between Angela and her mother is bracingly tart. A drunken conversation outside a gay nightclub between Lee and Angela veers subtly but unnervingly close to relationship-ending territory. Every person in this film is messy, especially those who try to hide their flaws the most, but Ahn has great love for all of them. Despite differences in age, sexuality, gender, race and culture, these imperfect men and women must unite to make their situation work, and the film ends with a scene that is not just satisfying but quietly revolutionary.

► The Wedding Banquet is in UK cinemas from May 9.