THE WEDDING BANQUET is a feast of fun.
Not a remake of Ang Lee’s film from over thirty years ago, rather a re imagining of it for the new millennium.
There’s a bucket load of charm and warmth and humour in THE WEDDING BANQUET, a generosity of spirit, a real sense of inclusion, with tensions and conflicts creating laughs mostly, and some tears, as two couples face life changing, love testing decisions.
Starring Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, and Han Gi-Chan as the four protagonists, all of whom are splendid, add Joan Chen as a Tiger mum and the indomitable and legendary South Korean superstar Youn Yuh -Jung who puts the grand into grandmother.
THE WEDDING BANQUET is a celebration of culture, tradition and the changing tide of progressive values, of acceptance and forgiveness.
There is wit and wisdom in every scene, great honesty and humanity, and such good humour. Whether Korean or queer, Anglo or straight, audiences should embrace THE WEDDING BANQUET as it flips genre, gender and generational conflict into the feel good movie of the moment.
Directed by Andrew Ahn, THE WEDDING BANQUET is written by Ahn and James Shamus, one of the original authors of its previous incarnation. It looks fabulous, and is unabashedly playful, projecting a capacious sense of comedy.
From immigration – Why would I want to live in America? The trains are slow and tipping is driving me spare – to IVF, THE WEDDING BANQUET covers a lot of dramatic and comedic ground in just over a hundred never a dull moment minutes.
If this is rom-com, bring it on, give us surfeit of it, the appetite will not sicken or die if genre films of this calibre continue to be made. One of the reasons it is so accessible, engaging and endearing, is that its comedy is complex, and so the com in rom-com could easily be the abbreviation of complexity. In that light, THE WEDDING BANQUET alone is fantastical.
