What's love got to do with it? That's one of the questions raised in the American-Chinese comedy The Wedding Banquet. It's an especially tough question to resolve when a man is willing to marry a woman he barely knows, in order to appease his conservative Chinese parents — while hiding from them the truth about his living arrangements with the guy he loves. Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) is one of those young, successful men who exist only in movies. He's a kind hearted real-estate entrepreneur who lives in a brown-stone in Manhattan with his lover Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein).
It's a great life, except that his parents keep badgering him about marrying a nice Chinese girl. Fortunately, the folks live in Taiwan, and Wai-Tung has distracted them for years with sob stories about how he can't find the right woman. It's just a little white lie — and its consequences are about to hit him with the force of a speeding truck.
Wai-Tung's parents are preparing to visit New York. His father is in declining health and wants to see a grandchild before he dies. Wai-Tung, meanwhile, is between a rock and a hard place: he can't bear the thought of marriage or of telling his parents the truth.
When all seems hopeless, he discovers that one of his tenants is a Chinese artist who will do anything for a Green Card. As luck would have it, Wei-Wei (May Chin) has a habit of falling for handsome gay men. (She's also certain that she can convert Wai-Tung to the joys of heterosexuality.)
The Wedding Banquet is a comedy of manners. It tends to be slow, a little too studied in its delivery and overtly politically correct. But when it works, it's both touching and hysterically funny.
The movie also surprises with a series of twists at the end. Many of Wai-Tung's assumptions about love and family are rather inaccurate, and it takes his wife, his lover and — to an odd degree — his father - to guide him to a compromise that's part Yin and part Yang.
The film is the American debut of Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee, whose work possesses the droll, understated qualities characteristic of films by other New Wave Taiwanese directors such as Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien.
Like his countrymen, Ang Lee takes seriously the traditions of Chinese family life, even while satirizing them to the max.
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