The Wedding Banquet: A Beloved Queer Text, Refreshed

by Heesun Park

In 1993, Ang Lee’s queer romcom The Wedding Banquet was released to immense critical acclaim.

Depicting the chaos that ensues when a Taiwanese man in a happy gay relationship marries a woman in order to placate his traditional parents, The Wedding Banquet amassed praise for its ability to rise above its archetypal premise, offering sincerity towards its characters and a depiction of a reconciliation between the ever-different East and West. Beyond box office success, Oscar nominations, and preservation in the United States National Film Registry, the film is a queer cult classic that still evokes emotional responses today.

It is an understatement to say, then, that 32 years later, Andrew Ahn’s (Fire Island, Driveways) 2025 remake has some enormous shoes to fill. 

Working with James Schamus, a frequent collaborator of Lee and a co-writer of the original film, Ahn goes beyond a mere recreation of The Wedding Banquet. He reimagines it for today’s audience by widening the scope of the story, doubling the relationships, and doubling the stakes.

In the 2025 film, Min (Han Gi-Chan), in need of a green card to quell his grandmother (Youn Yuh-Jung), the matriarch of a multinational corporate empire, proposes to his commitment-phobic boyfriend, Chris (Bowen Yang), only to be rejected. Desperate for a solution, Min turns to the pair’s closest friends and lesbian counterparts, Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone), and offers to fund Lee’s IVF journey in exchange for Angela’s hand. 

Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet is an ambitious and multi-layered adventure. So much so that it almost feels like a 103-minute runtime is a box too small for it. Against themes of queer and cultural identity, found and chosen family, the story deconstructs its characters to their most vulnerable forms and their actors bring to the table a well of lived experience and intelligence that acts as the glue pulling everything together.

I participated in a roundtable discussion with Bowen Yang, Kelly Marie Tran, Han Gi-Chan, and Lily Gladstone prior to the theatrical release of The Wedding Banquet, and their responses revealed depths to the film my mind was unable to grasp in my own viewing experience.

They understood the script of The Wedding Banquet as a queer text so thoroughly, offering analyses that went beyond their personal connections to their characters. It made me wish we—the audience and the cast—had the chance to spend more time sitting in the world of The Wedding Banquet. Maybe as a two-hour-long film or even a drama series! Reading that the shoot spanned 25 days and the actors had little to no time for preparation before heading to set makes me wonder if we were robbed of the chance for even more.

This isn’t to understate the cast’s performances in the film. The lived realities of the actors certainly breathed life into The Wedding Banquet.

Though the romances between Chris and Min, and Angela and Lee were both entertaining and beautiful, the moments between Min and Ja-Young (Youn Yuh-Jung) and Angela and May (Joan Chen) absolutely sing. 

Han Gi-Chan and Kelly Marie Tran portray queer children searching for connection to their families in such a heartaching way, and Youn Yuh-Jung and Joan Chen perform as parental figures grasping to understand their children with such wisdom and mastery. Amongst the chaos and comedy of the wedding heist, it is the moments between child and parent that anchor and ground the audience to the story.

Knowing that Youn Yuh-Jung actually lived through her own The Wedding Banquet enriches the parent-child connection. The veteran actress revealed during promotions for the film that her eldest son came out to her in 2000 and that she threw a wedding banquet for him and his husband, away from the eyes of conservative Korea, as soon as gay marriage was legalized in New York. The silence between her character and Min was magnetizing, no doubt, because Youn Yuh-Jung knew exactly what to say through the quiet.

All in all, Andrew Ahn’s 2025 The Wedding Banquet is an important film for everyone. To the cast, to the director, and, of course, to the audience. It is a film that not only excavates the friction between queer and cultural identity, found and biological family, but also explores the question: Will we seize the opportunity for happiness even when it requires us to be at our most vulnerable?

Watch The Wedding Banquet now in theaters.