The Wedding Banquet: Queer Love in a Straight World

This past Friday, I went to see a remake of an older film called The Wedding Banquet. While I had not seen the older version of this film at the time, I was still looking forward to it due to cast members Bowen Yang and Lily Gladstone, both of whom I’ve enjoyed in their previous roles. 

For a quick plot breakdown, there are two couples: Min and Chris, and Lee and Angela. They’re all living in Seattle in Lee’s family home. Min is rich and needs a green card, Angela and Lee need money for IVF. Because Min’s grandparents are assumed to be conservative, they strike a deal for Min and Angela to get married. Chaos ensues and they all live happily ever after.

Before seeing the original of the film from 1993, my thoughts on the 2025 version were mostly positive. All of the actors were hilarious while still holding a realism to the characters, even in the most absurd of situations. Additionally, I loved all the easter eggs to queer cinema of the past, my favorites being “We have to de-queer the house” (The Birdcage) and Lily Gladstone pulling Certain Women off of the shelf, referencing the film in which she was a cowboy lesbian in love with Kristen Stewart. This harkens to the bigger picture of this film: it is a celebration of the intersectionalities of culture. Yes, it’s a celebration of the culture of queer Americans, but it is also a celebration of Korean culture through the wedding scene and Min's grandmother and all the delicious food she makes. What I specifically like about the film’s depiction of queer culture is that it explores the reaction to queerness generation by generation. With the generation the main characters belong to (somewhere in the Gen-Z to Millennial era), they’re accepting of pretty much anything. With their parents, they either work on getting rid of the homophobia they were taught or they stay the way they are. And with their grandparents, it takes longer. While I don’t think these structures are always true or accurate, I do believe that it takes longer for each generation to adapt to loving a person regardless of their queerness due to the cultures that each generation grew up in (i.e. more or less conservative). This is why the grandma's story was especially touching to me. In the trailers and the first half of the film, she's painted as this extremely traditional and close-minded figure, but then reveals that she actually just wants her grandson to be happy and the real homophobe is the grandfather, who we never meet. This is where we run into my issues with the film. We don’t realistically have threats to this house of queer joy, besides the grandma and the whole Angela-gets-impregnated-by-Chris drama, but it’s solved in 15 minutes, causing there to be few stakes throughout the film. Regardless, the story is fun and gives the characters their own level of existence, as opposed to forcing them into a straight world.

After seeing the 2025 version, I went back home and watched the original 1993 version. What struck me most about this film is there are no lesbians, but rather one poor straight girl in need of a visa who is friends with the gay couple. This was very disappointing to me, but I quickly got over it because we got both Wai-Tung’s mom and the dad visiting, something I longed for while watching the 2025 version. Because I saw the 2025 version first, I knew that the mother would be more accepting than the father, but then throughout the film we see each of the characters developing a closer and more intimate relationship with each other, and eventually when both parents are told (separately), they both accept their son in the end because they just want him to be happy. I think that this connection from both grandparents, instead of just one taking the blame for the homophobia, is missing from the 2025 version. With all of these good things about the 1993 version, there are some issues yet again. First, it doesn’t feel like the couple are actually queer because they don’t have a community around them like they do in the 2025 version. This makes it feel like queerness is used as a prop instead of a feature of the film. Additionally, we get a very American version of the traditional wedding banquet, unlike in the 2025 version. The worst offender in this film is that the main girl literally rapes her new husband, who is gay. This scene was so incredibly hard to watch, and the film acts like he had a choice and actively cheated on his boyfriend, while treating her like she did nothing wrong. It ends well with the once-thought-to-be homophobic parents accepting their son for who he is, but did we really need the rape scene to get there? I don’t think so. I think the 2025 version did this better, as well. Instead of rape, both characters have insecure drunk sex which leads to a pregnacy. I think this is a much better way to get someone pregnant instead of rape, for what I feel are obvious reasons. 

In sum, both of these films were fun to watch. They each have their faults, some more obvious than others, but I quite enjoyed watching both of them. Don’t forget to follow me on Letterboxd (@avianfruitss) and comment down below if you would rather be in a lesbian couple with Lily Gladstone or Bowen Yang!