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Ang Lee’s 1993 romantic comedy The Wedding Banquet takes a while to get to the titular event, but it’s worth the wait. Bride Wei-Wei (Mei Ching) and groom Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) are strikingly beautiful. The story unfolds in a sprawling New York Chinese restaurant, where the lobster dishes gleam so sumptuously that they might foreshadow the sumptuous feasts to come in Lee’s 1994 food-porn extravaganza Eat Drink Man Woman. Lee records the wedding reception and its rituals with an almost anthropological interest, and the coolness of his camera only heightens the brash, bacchanalian comedy of the proceedings. There are bizarre, humiliating games, lewd speeches, bursts of drunken laughter, and a cruel spirit of mockery of the newlyweds. The alcohol flows so freely that the toilet almost becomes a vomiting chamber. One of the few white guests mutters, “God, I thought the Chinese were meek, quiet mathematical geniuses.” Another responds sarcastically, “You are witnessing the results of five thousand years of sexual repression.”
The actor who delivers the final line is Lee himself, making an uncredited cameo in one of his early films. He may have anticipated the rest of his career, as repression became his most enduring and resonant theme. Lee moved freely between continents and eras, with such varied – and brilliant – results as The Ice Storm (1997), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Lust, Caution (2007). But again and again, no matter the time or place, he rediscovers the same thread: the imposition of strict social restrictions on uncontrollable desires.
In The Wedding Banquet, Lee astutely unfolds the drama between two distinct but interconnected spheres of repression; he lovingly delves into the tensions and obligations that underlie many Asian parent-child relationships and connects them almost seamlessly to the anxieties and anxieties of closeted gay life. The wedding begins as an elaborate three-way ploy devised by Wai-Tung, a gay Taiwanese man, his white boyfriend Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein), and Wei-Wei, an illegal Chinese immigrant. This arranged marriage is supposed to provide Wei-Wei with a green card and satisfy Wai-Tung’s Taiwan-based parents, Mr. Gao (Long Si-hung) and Mrs. Gao (Gua Ah-le), who are unaware that their son is gay and are pressuring him to find a wife and start a family.
Things go awry, however, when the Gaos unexpectedly fly to New York for their son’s wedding, triggering the plan and a grand wedding feast. The genius of the banquet scene is that even if the festivities do symbolize a collective release of tension, as Lee, the cameo actor, points out, Lee, the director, ensures that the pressure never lets up. We see the discomfort on Wai-Tung and Wei-Wei’s faces as they are led through a gauntlet of forced mirth and forced to drink, one after the other. Everyone thinks they are celebrating; in reality, they are suppressing a grief they have no way to express.
Sourse: newyorker.com
