Shot and situated in New York, Lee’s original Wedding Banquet follows a bisexual Taiwanese immigrant named Wai-Tung who lives with his boyfriend. Exh
Shot and situated in New York, Lee’s original Wedding Banquet follows a bisexual Taiwanese immigrant named Wai-Tung who lives with his boyfriend. Exhausted by his conservative parents’ persistent nosiness around his love life, Wai-Tung marries a woman from mainland China who’s in need of a green card, an arrangement he hopes will allow him to live his life in peace. Naturally, his parents travel from Taiwan to throw him a conventional wedding banquet, forcing Wai-Tung, his “roommate,” and his up-to-date bride to perform an elaborate, extensive charade—one that inevitably reveals core truths about their fraught, if loving, relationships with one another.
The 1993 film was produced in part by Oscar nominee James Schamus, who also backs Ahn’s up-to-date update, set to hit theaters in the spring. (Schamus cowrote the screenplay with Ahn too.) Set in Seattle, this version has a fuller ensemble, telling a larger story about a chosen family. Angela (Tran) and her girlfriend, Lee (Lily Gladstone), are trying to have a baby through IVF; their best friends, Chris (Bowen Yang) and his partner Min (Han Gi-chan), live in their guesthouse. While Angela and Lee struggle to decide whether to pay for another round of fertility treatments, Min faces pressure to go back to his native Korea to take over the family business. A wedding plot is hatched: Angela will fake-marry Min in a conventional Korean ceremony. That way, she can raise funds for IVF while he secures a green card—and creates a sheen of old-fashioned respectability for back home.
“Weddings are intensely important markers in the growth of your relationships, even fake ones,” Ahn says. “Through the process of planning it, of going through it, you grow in your relationships.” The scheme tests the very tight bond between Yang’s Chris and Tran’s Angela. It prods Chris to consider his own commitment to Min. And it intensifies Lee and Angela’s plans to raise children. “You can’t whoopsie-daisy a baby in the way that straight people can,” Ahn says.
The cast has been working together for a few weeks by now, and an intense feeling of community defines the set—between takes, over lunch, even down in video village. “The four of us claimed each other so quickly. There’s space for everybody to try things, to have fun, to just bounce off of each other,” says Oscar nominee Gladstone, who’s thrilled to be doing some comedy after the bulky one-two punch of Killers of the Flower Moon and Under the Bridge. “If I were to put a word around it, it’s ‘precious.’ Everybody feels precious to each other.”
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