A reimagined classic of queer Asian love – Andrew Anh’s take on the 1993 Ang Lee film, The Wedding Banquet
The Wedding Banquet (2025) is a tender, emotionally layered reimagining of Ang Lee’s 1993 comedy classic. Under director Andrew Ahn’s thoughtful direction, the original storyline is updated for a new era—one in which queer Asian Americans are afforded more freedom, yet remain entangled in cultural traditions and familial expectations.
At the heart of the film is a quartet of housemates, lovers, and emotional entanglements. Chris (Bowen Yang) is a commitment-phobe, paralyzed by indecision in both his career and relationship. His partner, Min (Han Gi-Chan), is an aspiring artist living in the U.S. on an expiring student visa who is also the reluctant heir to a Korean multinational empire. The two live in the garage of a Seattle home owned by Lee (Lily Gladstone), an Indigenous and queer youth organizer who longs to be a parent, and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), an introverted scientist whose fraught relationship with her own mother (played to perfection by Joan Chen) has left her uncertain whether she’s capable of becoming one herself.
The quartet live in a kind of queer domestic idyll—gardening, partying, and sharing morning routines—until Min gets a call from his grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) that disrupts their delicate balance. Tensions that once simmered below the surface start to boil over. Lee’s IVF treatments aren’t taking. And when Min proposes a green card marriage with Angela to solve their complicated set of problems, their lives spiral into further chaos and disarray. The road to this improbable solution is marked by comedic missteps and emotional reckonings, but it’s the fractured, very human family they cobble together in the end that marks the film’s happy ending.
Cold Tea Collective’s Kacie Chow and Dennis Tran spoke with Andrew Anh,…
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