The Wedding Banquet

                                                 The Wedding Banquet by Ang Lee

            In the Wedding Banquet Wai-Tung Gao is a gay Taiwanese man living with his partner Simon in Manhattan. His parents back in Taiwan keep trying to set up Wai-Tung with single women that fit his extremely picky preference. Eventually his partner Simon comes up with the idea to have Wai-Tung marry one of the tenants from the building he owns do his parents will stop meddling with his life. This benefits the girl as well Wei-Wei is a struggling artist from China without a green card and the idea of a fake marriage benefits her just as much as it benefits Wai-Tung and Simon.

            Wai-Tung’s parents fly to Manhattan from Taiwan to hold a wedding for their son with 30,000 dollars, which was a gift from friends and family back home. Wai-Tung’s decision to hold an impromptu courthouse wedding displeases his parents greatly and he allows them to hold a grand wedding banquet as a way to make it up to them. After the wedding banquet Wei-Wei and Wai-Tung have drunken sex and Wei-Wei becomes pregnant because of this. Later After a tense living situation with Simon, Wei-Wei and his parents all living in the same house Wai-Tung explodes in front of everyone and argues with Simon and Wei-Wei.

            After the argument he confesses to his real relationship with Simon to his mother and elsewhere Simon is learning from Wai-Tung’s father that he figured out their relationship on his own. Wai-Tung’s father gives Simon the dowry money that they originally gave Wei-Wei and tells him not to tell anyone. Wei-Wei meanwhile has decided to keep her baby after failing to go to her set appointment at the clinic for an abortion.  Simon, Wai-Tung and Wei-Wei decide to all be involved in raising the child as a seemingly unconventional parental unit.

            Although the Wedding Banquet is considered to be a comedy I believe it is often a more dramatic work at its core. It is a great study into the problems and life of a gay couple struggling to live happily, openly, trying to find tolerance and acceptance from ones own family. This tolerance is humorously obscured to the characters in the film because both the mother and the father each tell Simon and Wai-Tung to not tell the other parent how they have come to accept their son’s gay lifestyle. These scenes were exhilarating because not every family has the love and heart to accept their children over their preconceived notions about sexuality and homosexuality.

The theme of acceptance runs heavily through this movie and I understand that Ang Lee focuses heavily on this theme throughout other movies of his such as Brokeback Mountain and Taking Woodstock. I found this to be my favorite out of the three because of how family and society had not torn Simon and Wai-Tung apart but further reinforced their love and relationship even though the pregnancy of Wei-Wei does make their situation a very strange one.