Another Gay Movie: The Wedding Banquet

Another movie review submitted by Adam Isn't Here.

You can’t accuse Ang Lee of making the same movie twice. He’s helmed an indie sleeper (The Ice Storm), a bombastic kung-fu genre extravaganza (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), a modern gay touchstone (Brokeback Mountain), a Merchant-Ivory style period piece (Sense and Sensibility), and an underrated, Hollywood super-hero blockbuster (The Hulk). And still, despite the all the variation in setting and style, his films are really about one thing: repressed desire. Judging from his work, it would be pretty safe to say that he thinks that it’s a bad thing.

With that in mind, The Wedding Banquet seems somehow set apart from the rest. Not in it’s theme of course. It’s the story of a gay Taiwanese man who lives in Manhattan with his boyfriend, and decides to marry his female, Chinese, artist tenant to appease his traditional parents. Fits the model, right? The difference seems to be in the conclusions he arrives at regarding a live filled with lies built upon lies.

First, a bit more on the plot. Wai-Tung has lived in the US for ten years, and with his boyfriend, Simon, for five of those years. He owns a run-down warehouse building in Williamsburg where he fudges the zoning laws by renting a loft to Wei-Wei, an artist from mainland China. She can’t hold decent job as she has no green card (I feel that sister!), so she pays rent in her artwork, much to Wai-Tung’s dismay. Also she’s kind of in love with him, constantly lamenting the fact that her lot in life seems to be pining after handsome gay men.

After constant badgering from Wai-Tung’s parents, Simon suggests what could only amount to a win-win scenario. Why don’t Wei-Wei and Wai-Tung get married? That way, Wai-Tung’s parents are happy, and Wei-Wei can stay in the country. Eureka! Nobody expects the parents to actually show up. But, of course, they do and you can imagine what ensues. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it (though it did come out in 1993).

The most interesting thing about it for me was the ending. These folks are all lying to each other and themselves in one way or another, like all of Mr. Lee’s characters tend to. Well, years of going to the movies have taught us that coming clean and being yourself will set you free. Surely, in the end, everyone will understand why you’ve lied for so long, if only after a montage of anguished looks and swelling music and maybe a boozed-up bender. Alternatively you can keep lying, deny yourself, and suffer the agonizing consequences. Two options: choose one.

We don’t need to leave Lee’s oeuvre for examples of either. We all know what happened to Brokeback Mountain’s Ennis and Jack because they couldn’t face facts, grow a pair, and ditch back-water Montana-or-where-ever-the-fuck and move-to-San-Francisco-already because it’s fucking 1982 and you don’t need to live like this! One dead and one sentenced to a life in mourning. Super! The intrepid ladies of Sense and Sensibility (after much chatter) ultimately, finally, find a way to vocalize their feelings and they all wind up married to the men of their dreams. Dreamy! Crouching Tiger’s got examples of both: Shu-Lien and Mu-Bai flirt and makes eyes all across the medieval Chinese country side, and only while in the actual process of dying does Mu-Bai proclaim his love for her. Tragic! Shu-lien at least learns something from this, and instructs the bratty, wayward Jen to follow her own path and make her own kind of music and all that. She follows Mama Cass’ advice and jumps off a mountain (that one is the happy ending by the way).

In The Wedding Banquet the resolutions don’t come so neat-and-tidy. Here, no one ever reveals all, no one person gets the whole picture. Everyone has to compromise. While there may be a lot less outright deception in the end, it’s replaced only by a tacit understanding that everyone knows only what they need to know, and that not everything is for sharing.

The liberal in me wants to reject this. I want to think that total transparency would do away with the necessity of all the lies. The truth will set you free, right? But I think that leads to another big part of what the movie is about: what do these people expect of each other? Can Wai-Tung expect his traditional Chinese parents to ignore years of cultural sexual-repression and embrace him and his boyfriend without reservation? Can the parents expect their son to be the rich, handsome, family-man despite his own wishes? Can Wei-Wei expect Wai-Tung to fall in love with her because she feels that way for him? Can Simon expect Wai-Tung to tell his parents to just fuck off back to Taipei?

Well…no, no, no and, uh…no. But there is a way to make sure everyone isn’t totally miserable. And in the end it mostly works out. This is still movie-land after all.