In the continued trend of queer-focused romcoms, The Wedding Banquet fails to break the pattern of poor representation. Head of Reviews Robert Flynn talks about how Andrew Ahn’s modernisation of The Wedding Banquet pales in comparison to Ang Lee’s original film.
Over the last decade in Hollywood, the queer romcom has gradually become a sturdy and consistent staple of the American film industry. On one hand, films like Red, White & Royal Blue (2023), Bros (2022), and Love, Simon (2018) are representative of Hollywood becoming more inclusive toward non-heteronormative narratives. On the other hand, the films themselves often feel more in line with the strange, off-putting corporatisation of queer identities that repeatedly rears its head each and every pride month.
That is not to say that contemporary queer cinema has no grasp on the cultural zeitgeist. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and Call Me by Your Name (2017) have proven to be authentic, artistically rich representations of queerness that have become totemic films in the modern queer cinema canon. Nevertheless, these films are also representative of queer cinema looking backward to the twentieth century in order to represent present day queerness.
At each end of the spectrum of modern queer cinema, there lies a reticence toward representing twenty first century queer life.
Andrew Ahn's The Wedding Banquet (2025) shows a marriage of these two spectrum ends. Ahn’s latest film is a modernisation of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993), a generational landmark of a film which represented the tensions and turmoils of gay men being beholden to conservative, familial expectations. Even today, Ang Lee’s film continues to be an astoundingly emotionally intelligent dramedy that managed to weave levity into a story about generational shifts, family and culture shocks all culminating in a sudden “bogus” marriage used to conceal the homosexuality of the male lead.
While Lee’s film considered the perspectives of the parents, friends, and partners involved in the titular faux wedding banquet, Ahn’s film zeroes in on the queerness of the text, focusing on a friend group consisting of two couples: boyfriends Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-chan) and girlfriends Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone). After two costly failed attempts at IVF, Lee and Angela fear that their options for having a child are becoming frighteningly slim. Meanwhile in the couple’s guest house, Chris and Min try to navigate the next step in their relationship as Min’s work visa stands to expire, meaning that he must return to South Korea to work for his family business.
In a noticeably convoluted attempt at creating a sense of narrative tension, Min proposes marriage to Angela, offering to pay for an additional IVF treatment if Angela agrees to help Min achieve green card status. After this quickly falls through, Min’s grandmother Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-jung) asks the sexually-opposed fiancees to hold a fake wedding banquet in order to please Min’s grandfather.
In trying to modernise The Wedding Banquet, the dramedy immediately runs into several structural and narrative issues. In Lee’s film, the perspective of the parents is integral to the flow of the film, their need for a grandchild and heterosexual only child driving the entire film. In Ahn’s remake, the same somewhat dated expectations cannot justifiably exist. Instead, the parents and grandparents are eager to fully comprehend what queerness is, often resulting in trite jokes of parents conflating bisexuality and pansexuality. The overall result is a film struggling to create any semblance of narrative drive while trying to commit to representing contemporary queerness accurately, ultimately feeling as though it is in conflict with itself.
What then predominantly becomes the concern of The Wedding Banquet are the romantic relationship dynamics between the two struggling couples. Angela and Lee try to reconcile the two failed IVF attempts, Angela beginning to question if she would even like to become a mother. Min proposes marriage to Chirs, however, Chris becomes concerned with whether or not he is willing to make such a lofty commitment. While Ahn feels as though he wishes to represent the modern concerns of queer couples, there is nothing innately queer about their troubles. The Wedding Banquet becomes more about taking the next step in a relationship and general commitment issues than anything relating to contemporary queerness.
The most damning aspect of Ahn’s film comes down to how it rewrites the powerful conclusion of Lee’s original film. The conclusion of Ang Lee’s film provides no answers and remains ambiguous, the future familial relationships are uncertain as the parents' discovery of their son's homosexuality challenges their own needs and worldview. It is a film that ultimately subverts the conservative trappings of heteronormative romcoms by seeing a typically absurd romcom premise through to its challenging bitter end. Ahn’s modernisation feels no different to any other hollow romcom or dramedy, unfortunately relying on simplicity and treacly sentiment.
It can often feel unnecessary to put pressure on each new queer film to provide an element of nuanced conversation on contemporary queerness. However, it is important to hold films like The Wedding Banquet accountable when such few films actually feel as though they are concerned with creating a film that accurately reflects the modern queer experience.