Chen, Joan

A retelling of Ang Lee’s classic of queer cinema comes at the same farcical situation in a new way.Though it’s as modern as can be, there’s a touch of something Shakespearean about “The Wedding Banquet.” The plot, on paper, is just straight-up farce: Trying to solve a complicated set of problems, a lesbian agrees to marry her best friend’s boyfriend — but then his grandmother comes to town, intending to throw them a huge traditional celebration.That premise is a 21st-century twist on Ang Lee’s 1993 queer classic, written by James Schamus. In that film, a Taiwanese American man marries his female tenant, rather than his own male partner, both to hide his real relationship from his parents and to help her get a green card. This version, directed by Andrew Ahn and written by Ahn and Schamus, gets more knotty, mostly because same-sex marriage is now legal in the United States, so the characters face a different series of snags. Both films explore how someone from a traditional Asian family navigates queer identity, highlighting the comedy and discomfort and discovery that result when cultures collide. But in this new “Wedding Banquet,” the focus shifts too.In this story, Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) are deeply in love, living in the Seattle house that Lee inherited from her mother. Angela’s mother (Joan Chen) is an exuberant ally to Seattle’s queer community, in a manner so performative that it seems like she might be making up for something. The pair are feeling the strain as Lee tries to conceive through a second round of expensive in vitro fertilization. When it doesn’t work, they start to give up hope: They just don’t have the money for a third round, and Lee is beginning to wonder if her age has something to do with it.Their lives are tightly entwined with those of Angela’s best friend, Chris (Bowen Yang), and his artist boyfriend, Min (Han Gi-Chan), who live in a guesthouse in Lee and Angela’s backyard. Min also happens to be the wealthy heir to a large corporation that his grandmother (Yuh-Jung Youn) expects him to run. He does not wish to do this. He could escape it if he had a way to renew his visa, and thus he proposes to Chris. But Chris is scared of commitment, and so Min, desperate to avoid his fate, concocts a plan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More