The Wedding Banquet [Xi yan] *** (1993, Winston Chao, Mitchell Lichtenstein, May Chin, Ah-Lei Gua, Sihung Lung) – Classic Movie Review 10,761

Co-writer/ director Ang Lee’s 1993 comedy drama The Wedding Banquet [Xi yan] is a funny, touching, carefully observed little film with strong performances. Ang based the first half of his movie on the true story of his friend Neil Peng.

A young gay Taiwanese businessman, Wai-Tung Gao (Winston Chao in his debut), is living in America with his lover Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein, son of the pop artist Roy) of five years as a Manhattan gay couple, but he decides to help Wei-Wei (May Chin), a girl needing a green card by joining her in a marriage of convenience.

His parents insist on visiting him when they think that he is settling down with a nice girl, so he masquerades as straight and lets the parents persuade him into a huge Chinese wedding banquet, where things go hilariously wrong.

The Wedding Banquet [Xiyan] motors on its strong, wittily written, believable screenplay and its attractive performances, especially from Sihung Lung and Ah-Lei Gua [Ah-Leh Gua], who make the most of their parts as the wise, bewildered but ultimately accepting parents, Mr Gao and Mrs Gao. Fittingly the wedding itself is hilarious and the banquet the tasty highlight, but the laughs keep coming in a well-paced series of telling scenes.

There is an attractive spirit of harmony, but the question of even these good-hearted people coming between a stable and happy gay couple isn’t addressed, so its sexual politics and even its attitude to the story are ambiguous and unresolved, and open to adverse criticism, though it evidently means well.

It is filmed in a mix of Chinese and English.

It won the Golden Berlin Bear for best film at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1993, though tied with The Women from the Lake of Scented Souls (1993), and was a 1994 Oscar nominee as Best Foreign Language Film.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 10,761

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