| The Wedding Banquet | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |||||||||
| Chinese name | |||||||||
| Chinese | 喜宴 | ||||||||
| |||||||||
| Directed by | Ang Lee | ||||||||
| Written by | Ang Lee Neil Peng James Schamus | ||||||||
| Produced by | Ang Lee Ted Hope James Schamus | ||||||||
| Starring | |||||||||
| Cinematography | Jong Lin | ||||||||
| Edited by | Tim Squyres | ||||||||
| Music by | Thierry Schollhammer Chosei Funahara | ||||||||
Production companies | |||||||||
| Distributed by | Central Motion Picture Corporation (Taiwan) The Samuel Goldwyn Company (U.S.) | ||||||||
Release dates |
| ||||||||
Running time | 106 minutes | ||||||||
| Countries | Taiwan United States[1] | ||||||||
| Languages | Mandarin English | ||||||||
| Budget | $1 million[2] | ||||||||
| Box office | $23.6 million[2] | ||||||||
The Wedding Banquet[3] is a 1993romantic comedy film directed, produced and co-written byAng Lee. The story concerns a gayTaiwanese immigrant man (Winston Chao, in his film debut) who marries amainland Chinese woman (May Chin) to placate his parents (Gua Ah-leh andLung Sihung) and get her agreen card. His plan backfires when his parents arrive in the United States to plan his wedding banquet and he has to hide the truth of his gay partner (Mitchell Lichtenstein). It was a co-production of Lee'sGood Machine production company, and the TaiwaneseCentral Motion Picture Corporation.
Lee's second feature film and his first to get a theatrical release in the United States,The Wedding Banquet premiered at the43rd Berlin International Film Festival, where it won theGolden Bear. It was both a critical and commercial success and won fiveGolden Horse Awards, includingBest Film andBest Director. It receivedOscar andGolden Globe nominations for Best Foreign-Language Film, as well as sixIndependent Spirit Award nominations.
Together withPushing Hands (1991) andEat Drink Man Woman (1994), all showing the Confucian family at risk, and all starring the Taiwanese actor Lung Sihung,The Wedding Banquet forms what has been called Lee's "Father Knows Best" trilogy.[4]
In 2023, the film was selected for preservation in the United StatesNational Film Registry by theLibrary of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
A remakeof the same name was released on April 18, 2025.
Gao Wai-Tung is aGayTaiwanese immigrant happily living inManhattan with his gayJewish partner Simon. He has not come out to his traditionally-minded parents who live back in Taiwan and, as he's in his late 20s, they've become eager to see him get married and have a child in order to continue the family line. When his parents hire a dating service, Wai-Tung and Simon stall for time by inventing numerous impossible demands. They demand an opera singer while requesting that she must be 5'9", have two PhDs, and speak five languages. To their shock, the service actually locates a 5'8" Chinese woman who meets all but one of their qualifications, having only a single PhD instead of two. She is very gracious when Wai-Tung explains his dilemma, as she too is hiding a relationship with a white man from her parents.
At Simon's insistence, Wai-Tung decides to marry one of his tenants, Wei-Wei, a penniless artist frommainland China in need of agreen card. Besides helping Wei-Wei, the couple hope that this will placate Wai-Tung's parents. To complicate matters, Mr. and Mrs. Gao announce they will visit. Before the parents arrive, Simon tells Wei-Wei everything she needs to know about Wai-Tung's habits, body, and lifestyle, and the three hastily take down all gay imagery and décor from the house and hang Mandarin calligraphy scrolls in its place.
Mr. and Mrs. Gao arrive bringing gifts and US$30,000 to hold an extravagant wedding for their son, believing he has a wealthy fiancée. Wai-Tung dares not tell his parents the truth, because his father (a retiredarmy officer) has just recovered from a stroke. As a part of the lie, Wai-Tung introduces Simon as his landlord.
The day after his parents arrive, Wai-Tung announces that he and Wei-Wei plan to be married by aJustice of the Peace. However, the heartbreak his mother experiences at the courthouse wedding, both at the arrangement and at the discovery of the low social class of Wei-Wei, moves Wai-Tung to make up for the 'disgraceful' wedding by accepting the offer of a magnificent wedding banquet from Mr. Gao's formerbatman, who now owns a restaurant and reception hall. After the lavish banquet, a huge party of relatives and friends barges into the bridal suite for an after party anddemand that the newlyweds get in bed naked before they will leave. This leads to Wei-Wei's pregnancy. Simon is extremely upset when he finds out, provoking an argument between the two of them and Wei-Wei, and his relationship with Wai-Tung begins to deteriorate.
Mr. Gao suffers another stroke, and in a moment of anger after the fight, Wai-Tung admits the truth to his mother. She is shocked and insists that he not tell his father. However, the perceptive Mr. Gao has seen more than he is letting on, and tells Simon that he knows about their relationship and considers Simon his son as well, appreciating the considerable sacrifices he made to be together with Wai-Tung. Mr. Gao gives Simon ahongbao, a symbolic admission of their relationship, but has Simon promise not to let on to the others that he knows the truth, saying that without the sham marriage, he'd never have a grandchild. While en route to an appointment for anabortion, Wei-Wei decides to keep the baby, and asks Simon to stay together with Wai-Tung and be the baby's father too.
At the airport before the Gaos' flight home, Mr. Gao accepts Simon and warmly shakes his hand and Mrs. Gao bids Wei-Wei a fond farewell before they walk off to board their plane, leaving the unconventional new family to figure themselves out.
Elisabetta Marino, author of "When East Meets West: A Sweet and Sour Encounter in Ang Lee'sThe Wedding Banquet", wrote that the film suggests that there can be a reconciliation between Eastern and Western cultures, unlike inAmy Tan's novels where the cultural differences are portrayed as irreconcilable.[5]About 60% of the film's dialogue is in Mandarin Chinese.[citation needed] Marino wrote that "after striving to read the subtitles for the first ten or fifteen minutes, one finds oneself so completely absorbed in the flow of the story, in the tones of the several voices, in the gestures and the facial expressions of the actors, that one simply forgets to read and reaches an understanding beyond languages, beyond words, following a plot and, most of all, a set of characters who do not conform to the stereotypical portrayals an American audience would expect." Marino argued that "Lee's creative process and his final choice of two languages, Mandarin Chinese and English, for the movie are in themselves symptomatic of his wish to reach a peaceful coexistence between apparently irreconcilable cultures, without conferring the leading role on either of them."[5]
Neil Peng approached director Ang Lee with the idea behindThe Wedding Banquet in 1986 by revealing to Lee that one of their mutual friends had moved to the United States and was in a same-sex relationship without the knowledge of the man's parents.[citation needed] Lee and Peng began writing the screenplay two years later and were soon joined byJames Schamus. In the published screenplay version of the film, Schamus wrote that the film was "first drafted in Chinese, then translated into English, re-written in English, translated back into Chinese, and eventually subtitled in Chinese and English and a dozen other languages." The script won a Taiwan state film competition in 1990.[6]
The Wedding Banquet was the debut film ofWinston Chao, whom Ang Lee met on an airline where he was working as a flight attendant. Chao, who had no formal acting training, was reticent to take the part, until Lee agreed to coach him with an acting instructor of his choosing. Chao spent three-to-four hours each day before and during filming in in-depth rehearsals.
Filming took place entirely on-location in New York City. To keep the budget low, the production used free or public locations, includingJFK International Airport, theMayor's Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting, Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens,NewYork-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital, and cast and crew members' homes.[1] The titular banquet scene was shot in the ballroom of aSheraton Hotel nearLaGuardia Airport.
The Wedding Banquet received positive reviews; on the review aggregatorRotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 94% approval rating based on 95 reviews, with an average rating of 7.7/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Ang Lee's funny and ultimately poignant comedy of manners,The Wedding Banquet reveals the filmmaker's skill across genres."[7] Alan Jones of theRadio Times said, "Sharply observed and never once striking a false note, this sweet-and-sour rib-tickler is a real treat."Roger Ebert wrote, "What makes the film work is the underlying validity of the story, the way the filmmakers don't simply go for melodrama and laughs, but pay these characters their due. At the end of the film, I was a little surprised how much I cared for them."[8]
The worldwide gross ofThe Wedding Banquet was $23.6 million. TheNew York Times reported a budget of $750,000.[9] Considering the $1 million budget reported byVariety, the film was also the most financially profitable movie of 1993, when considered in terms of ratios of return, while overall top grosserJurassic Park only earned a ratio of 13.8 ($914 million earnings on a $60 million budget).[2]
Aremake from directorAndrew Ahn starringLily Gladstone,Kelly Marie Tran andBowen Yang in the key roles, with supporting parts fromJoan Chen andYoun Yuh-jung, premiered at the 2025Sundance Film Festival, and was released on April 18, 2025. Principal photography took place inVancouver,British Columbia from May 27, 2024 to June 28, 2024.[12]
In December 1993, a novelization of the film, titledWedding Banquet (ウェディングバンケット,Wedingu Banketto) and published in Japan, was written by Yūji Konno (今野 雄二,Konno Yūji). (ISBN 4-8387-0508-5)[13]
In 2003, theVillage Theatre presented a musical staging of the story. It was directed byJohn Tillinger, choreographed bySergio Trujillo, with music by Woody Pak and book and lyrics byBrian Yorkey. Yorkey, Village's associate artistic director, said this of the production, "The film succeeds because of Ang Lee's delicate poetry, and there is no way we can replicate that or translate that into a musical. So we took the story a step further. Whereas the film ends very ambiguously, our musical goes on past where the film ends". The show starredWelly Yang as Wai Tung.[14]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
