I've been spacing these posts a little too far apart, and letting them pile up. So, I'm devoting a full week to new installments of my "Great Directors" series. Enjoy.
"The Wedding Banquet" is a film about love, not just romantic, but also filial - about the lengths that a son will go to in order to maintain his parents' happiness. They expect him to find a wife, to have children, and to follow the only path that they know to a happy and respectable life. Played by Gua Ah-leh and Sihung Lung, the parents are lovely, wonderful people who care very much for their son and do not deserve to have their hearts broken. The son, Wai-Tung, played by Winston Chao, is also a very sympathetic figure who deserves to have a happy life with his American partner. No one can be expected to change their ways, but it turns out that there's quite a lot of room for compromise.
I saw "The Wedding Banquet" for the first time a few months after I saw "The Farewell," and it was everything that I wanted that movie to be. Maybe it's because Ang Lee's portrayal of the Taiwanese and American culture clash feels much closer to my own experience, even though I was never a gay man in the 1990s. I suspect it's because Wai-Tung's relationship with his parents and other relatives overseas is more like mine - with the mismatched expectations, the long distances, and the little fictions that everyone maintains to keep the comfortable status quo. In "The Farewell," Awkwafina argues with her relatives about whether it's morally right to maintain a lie being told to an elder. In "The Wedding Banquet," such discussion is not even attempted. It's unthinkable to upend the traditional norms and admit the subterfuge, even when everyone figures out the truth in the end.
Built around the happy chaos of the parents' visit to America, a hastily conducted sham marriage, and the complicated fallout, the film is structured as a classic farce with many satirical moments. However, it's a comedy that has very few punchlines and is far more interested in its characters' relationships and communication issues than the usual laughs and mayhem. Still, the movie is very funny, especially the wild wedding banquet of the title, where Lee is able to put the raucous Chinese wedding traditions onscreen in their full glory, and gives himself one of the greatest director cameos of all time. The authenticity of the portrayal makes all the difference - the drinking, the pageantry, and the tight-knit community where everybody knows everybody else, even thousands of miles away from Taiwan.
I'm not surprised at all that the film is based on events from the filmmakers' own lives, or that Ang Lee, Neil Peng, and James Schamus wrote and rewrote the film in both English and Chinese multiple times, before finally settling on a film that was a good mixture of both. This was only Ang Lee's second feature, a rare Taiwanese and American co-production that raised his profile considerably on both sides of the Pacific. Nobody else made films about Asian characters like this in the 90s, or showed the full complexity of their family and social dynamics. It was because of his work on "The Wedding Banquet" that Lee was hired to direct "Sense and Sensibility," which really launched him to superstardom.
Lee's filmmaking style was still coming into focus at this stage in his career, but he was already very comfortable with intimate dialogue scenes, and doing a lot of interesting things with settings and space. I like how he works in so many wider shots that simply let the action play out, and observes the characters from a more distant vantage point. It does so much to help ground the story in a contemporary, familiar milieu. Frankly, as Lee's cinema has gotten more and more removed from his early films and early subject matter over the years, it's a side of him that I've missed. More filmmakers are making films about the Chinese and Taiwanese diaspora, but nobody makes them like he does.
What I've Seen - Ang Lee
The Wedding Banquet (1993)
Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)
Sense and Sensibility (1995)
The Ice Storm (1997)
Ride with the Devil (1999)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Hulk (2003)
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Life of Pi (2012)
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016)
Gemini Man (2019)
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